by Michael Rowe
Adeline placed her napkin on the table and pushed her chair away. “If you’ll excuse me, I have some correspondence to attend to this evening. Please don’t dawdle over dinner in my absence. It’s not helpful to Beatrice when you make extra work for her by tarrying.”
Jeremy sighed. “For that matter, we wouldn’t want to risk enjoying Beatrice’s cooking by ‘tarrying,’ much less endanger ourselves by digesting it properly, Mother.”
Instead of lashing back as was her usual wont, Adeline got up from the table without a word and walked out of the dining room. She looked straight ahead. They heard the sound of her high heels on the marble foyer and the sound of the door to Adeline’s study being shut. Then, silence.
“What the hell was that?” Jeremy asked in complete mystification. “What just happened? What did you say to her?”
“I have no idea,” Christina said, equally baffled. “Did I say something that offended her? She just walked out.” Christina turned to Morgan. “Honey, did you notice anything strange about your grandmother just now? Did I say something weird?”
“I don’t know,” Morgan said. “It looked like something hurt her feelings.”
“She doesn’t have ‘feelings,’ Morgan,” Jeremy said dryly. “And if you offended her, Christina, good for you. I don’t know how you did it. For a minute there, it was almost as if she had a heart. Which, as we all know, is bullshit.”
“Mom,” Morgan said tentatively. “Would it be all right if I went out? I mean, since Grandmother is . . . well, you know . . . not here for me to ask permission?”
Christina raised her eyebrows. “Where do you want to go, honey? It’s late, and it’s dark.”
“It’s not that late,” Morgan said. She showed her mother her watch. “It’s just a little after seven. I want to go and see if Finn is all right. He wasn’t at school today.”
“You don’t know the town very well yet, Morgan. It’s only been a few days. Why don’t you go and see him tomorrow afternoon?”
“Mom, please! I’ll be back in an hour or so. I just want to make sure he’s OK.”
“Do you even know where he lives?” Christina wasn’t sure if it was the notion of Morgan wandering around Parr’s Landing at night that bothered her, or the fact that she was going to see some local boy Christina hadn’t even met yet. You sound like Adeline right now, Christina chided herself. It didn’t take you very long to start worrying about ‘townies,’ as though you weren’t one yourself.
“I looked up his address in the phone book when I got home today,” Morgan said. “It’s not far from here.”
“Then why don’t you phone him?”
“Come on, Mom,” Morgan said, her voice brimming with teenage scorn. “If I were going to the library to study, you wouldn’t be saying a word. I walked around Toronto at night and you weren’t worried about that. What do you think is going to happen to me here? I’ll only be gone for an hour. I want to take a walk, anyway. I’ll just knock on his door, say hi, and come right back.”
Jeremy said, “Do you want me to drive you, Morgan?”
“No thanks, Uncle Jeremy. I really want to take a walk. I’m fifteen, you know,” she said. “I’m practically an adult.”
Christina sighed. “All right. But be back by nine, OK? And we won’t tell your grandmother where you are, or what you’re doing.” Now it was Morgan’s turn to sigh. “All I’m doing is going for a walk, Mom,” she said. “It’s no big deal, really.” Morgan kissed her mother on the cheek and practically danced out of the room.
“Take a sweater!” Christina called after her, but the front door had already swung shut. Christina hoped Adeline hadn’t heard it. She didn’t relish another lecture on propriety from her mother-in-law. But there was no sound from Adeline’s study. If she’d heard Morgan leave, she gave no indication of it.
“What do you want to do?” Jeremy said. “Shall we watch TV? Do you want to go to O’Toole’s and have a drink? Or go for a drive?” He seemed unsurprised by either Adeline’s departure, or Morgan’s, as though vicious hostility and unexplained behaviour shifts were simply a matter of family life. Jesus, Christina thought. No wonder Jack wanted out.
“Let’s go for a drive,” Christina said brightly. “Let’s go for a drive, all the way back to Toronto.”
Finn was lying sprawled across his bed rereading his Tomb of Dracula comics, trying to recapture some familiar joy in them, when his mother knocked on his door and told him there was a girl downstairs in the living room asking for him.
His cotton pillowcase was soaked and his eyes were red and sore. He hadn’t been able to eat much at dinner, which was already a sombre affair, since neither he nor his parents could forget that there was no furry black presence lying in the doorway where the dining room met the kitchen, front paws folded in front of her, head resting on paws, amber eyes watching the table in case her master dropped any food.
Even the story about the visit to the police station to report the discovery of the bag of knives failed to rouse much of a conversation. When Finn’s father said that hunters probably left the bag, there seemed to be a tacit, general agreement to let it go at that. No one wanted to talk about blood and slaughter up at Bradley Lake with Sadie missing.
As to Finn specifically, the emptiness of that doorway cut him so deeply that he’d had to excuse himself from the table, feeling he might be sick.
His parents excused him and he went up to his room to read, but the familiar images struck him as harsh and garish tonight. If Finn had been older, he’d have realized that he was receiving his first abject lesson in the cruel architecture of love and loss, and how no depicted horror— even in The Tomb of Dracula—could ever hope to match the awfulness of a real one, but he was just a twelve-year-old boy who loved a dog that was missing.
What was the point of being able to turn himself into a bat, or mist, or live in a ruined castle in Transylvania without Sadie sleeping next to him? What use was a crossbow, or a silver compact, or a crucifix in fighting Dracula and his minions without his best friend bounding ahead through the bush on one of their pre-dawn walks out by Bradley Lake, fetching her red ball and bringing it back to him as though it was the most precious token of love imaginable?
“What, Mom?” He leaned up on his elbow. “What did you say?”
“I said, there’s a young lady downstairs to see you,” Anne said. “She said her name is Morgan Parr, and that she’s a friend of yours.”
“Morgan is here?” he said, surprised. “She’s downstairs?”
“She seems a little old to be a friend of yours, Finnegan,” Anne added. “Which one of the family is she? How old is she?”
Finn sat up and wiped his face with his sleeve. “I don’t know how old she is. We sometimes walk home from school together,” he said, finessing the truth a little bit, knowing that his mother would be happier if Morgan were his age. “She just moved here, from Toronto. She lives at Parr House with her grandmother. Her mother lives there, too.”
Ah, Christina, of course—Christina Monroe. That was her name, at least back then. The one that got knocked up by Jack Parr and ran off to Toronto under the cover of darkness. That one. The tramp. So, not a real Parr after all, a shotgun Parr.
Anne Miller, who was not in the habit of gossiping, or thinking ill of other women, immediately regretted her mean-spirited bitchiness, even in thought, and rightly decided it was beneath her. All the girls had crushes on Jack Parr, truth be told, so no girl that landed him would ever be immune from the jealousy. Besides, she chided herself, it was all a long time ago. And it wasn’t this girl’s fault, anyway.
Anne noted that Finn had brightened since the news that Morgan Parr was downstairs waiting for him. Until Sadie came home, or was found, she’d be happy for anything that would take her son’s mind off his lost dog.
“She’s very pretty,” Anne said. “She looks like her dad. I knew him in school.”
“I guess,” Finn said, blushing. “Her dad’s dead, anyway.”
>
Anne blanched. “Jack’s dead? When? How?”
“I don’t know,” Finn said. “Don’t ask her about it, OK? I don’t think she wants to talk about that stuff. At least not yet.”
“Well, don’t just sit there,” Anne said, recovering. “Put some cold water on your face and come downstairs and greet your guest like a gentleman. We don’t want her running back and telling Mrs. Parr she visited a barnyard.”
Finn rolled his eyes at his mother. “She’s not like that,” he said, suddenly protective of Morgan. “Mom, please just— I’ll be right down, OK?”
He went down the hallway into the bathroom and closed the door. Anne heard the water running and the sound of splashing as Finn washed his face.
She went downstairs to tell Morgan that Finn would be down directly, and to offer her a soft drink while she waited. When Morgan smiled and thanked her politely, she felt even worse for her churlish thoughts about Christina Monroe and Jack Parr.
What an awful, awful day, she thought. First Sadie, then that horrible hockey bag, now this news.
Anne decided that another rum and coke—a strong one this time— might hasten sleep and bring it to a close a little sooner, which would be just what the doctor ordered.
“Your parents are nice,” Morgan said as she and Finn sat in the basement drinking Cokes. “Especially your mother. She asked me how I liked the town. I told her I liked it a lot, but it was hard to get used to.”
She glanced around as she spoke. On the fireplace mantle there was a framed photograph of a much younger Finn on the edge of a lake with his arms around a wet black Labrador retriever shaking water from its fur. Curling trophies, likely his father’s, flanked the photograph. Morgan took in the fake wood panelling and the wet bar, and the hockey and travel posters on the wall, thinking how nice it was not to be at Parr House where everything seemed to be a brittle antique, including her grandmother—to be in someplace normal for the first time since leaving Toronto.
“They’re OK,” Finn said, shrugging. Then, thinking better of it, he said, “No, they’re great. My mom, especially, yeah. I like them. Do you like your mom?” He mentally kicked himself for asking such a stupid question. “I mean, you probably do, right? Everyone likes their mom.”
Morgan laughed, but not unkindly. “Yeah, I love my mom. My uncle Jeremy, on the other hand, probably doesn’t love his—my grandmother is a bit hard to take sometimes. She’s a bit mean. She wasn’t really happy about you and I becoming friends, I guess.”
Finn sounded indignant. “How come? What’s wrong with me?”
“It isn’t you,” Morgan said. “It’s anyone from here. I think she’d like to think of me as this princess or something, and that I shouldn’t be associating with the peasants, which is how she sees the people who live here.”
“Well, she owns the whole town,” Finn said scornfully. “Of course she’d think like that. How come she let you come here, then?”
“She doesn’t know I’m here—and I can’t stay long.” Morgan looked at him more closely. Finn’s eyes were red and swollen. He looked as though he had been crying for hours. “Where were you today?” she asked gently. “I didn’t see you at lunchtime, or after school. Is everything OK?”
“My dog ran away. Her name is Sadie. I woke up this morning and she wasn’t in the yard,” he said simply. “She’s lost. I cut school early to go look for her. I went to Bradley Lake and looked all over, but I didn’t find her.”
“Oh, God,” Morgan said. “I’m so sorry, Finn. I didn’t know. Why didn’t you come get me when you got home? I would have helped you look.”
“It’s OK,” he said. “I didn’t want to get you into trouble. I almost got into trouble myself for cutting school but . . . well, something else happened this afternoon.”
“What do you mean?”
Finn looked towards the stairs leading to the living room where his parents were watching television. “If I tell you a secret, will you swear to keep it?”
Morgan shrugged. “Sure, I guess so. What is it?”
“No, don’t say ‘I guess so,’” he said urgently. “You have to swear.”
“OK, I swear.” She forced herself to keep from smiling. “What is it?”
Then he told her about the bag of knives and hammers he’d found at Spirit Rock.
Billy was pulling into the parking lot of the Nugget when he saw the flashing lights of the police cruiser coming towards him from the opposite direction. No siren, he thought mirthlessly. I guess they don’t think I’m a high-speed chase risk. Then, Enough is enough with this harassment by these goddamn yokel cops. The cruiser pulled sharply into the spot next to Billy’s allocated parking spot, the light still flashing.
He parked his Ford XL smartly and opened the door. The two cops— both of them this time, which surprised him—were already waiting for him beside their cruiser. The younger one actually had his flashlight out, shining it at the truck.
Billy put his hand up over his face, blocking the light. “Sergeant Thomson, would you please ask your colleague to put the light away? I’m not going anywhere and, as you can plainly see, I’m me. There’s no need for it.”
Thomson turned to Elliot and said, “Constable McKitrick, I don’t think we need that light on Professor Lightning.” Then back to Billy, “I apologize, sir.”
If Thomson’s intent in calling Billy “sir” and apologizing had been to reassure him, it had the opposite effect. In Billy’s experience, the only thing more ominous than a redneck cop being verbally abusive was a redneck cop being ostentatiously polite.
“What is it this time, Sergeant Thomson?” Billy said calmly. “What are you charging me with? Driving a Ford? Being an Indian driving a Ford? Staying in a motel in your town? Or maybe having dinner at O’Toole’s, which is where I have been all evening? It surely wasn’t speeding—and that was a paragon of parking I just did.”
The younger cop—McKitrick—didn’t smile, but Thomson did, however wanly. “Dr. Lightning, I wonder if you’d be so good as to accompany us to the police station for a word?”
“We’re having ‘a word’ right now, Sergeant Thomson,” Billy snapped. “Why do we need to go to the police station to do it? I’ve done nothing wrong. There’s no reason for me to go to the police station with you. As I explained to Constable McKitrick earlier today, I’m getting very tired of this harassment, and am prepared to take action to make it stop.”
“There’s been a . . . development,” Thomson said. “It relates to your story about your father’s death, as well as some other things. I’d really appreciate it if you’d come along with us and help us clear some things up. It won’t take any time at all, I’m sure. But we’d like to talk with you.”
“I think not,” Billy said coolly. “I think I’ll decline.”
“Sir,” Thomson said, this time with an edge, “if you don’t come along with us of your own volition, I’m prepared to arrest you. I don’t want to, but I will.”
“Arrest me? On what charge?”
“Please, Dr. Lightning,” Thomson said. “Trust me, I’d rather just speak with you down at the station. But I will take whatever measures I need to ensure that happens.”
“What are you going to do,” Billy demanded, “make something up? Some trumped-up charge?”
Thomson merely shrugged. “Would you please come along with us, Dr. Lightning?”
“You’re both going to hear from my lawyer about this,” Billy said in a cold fury. “The minute I get to a telephone, I’m calling Toronto.”
“It’s the middle of the night, Dr. Lightning, and we’re a long way from Toronto. Now,” Thomson said, opening the passenger door for Billy, “if you please—just a chat.”
At the police station, Thomson showed Billy the hockey bag. It was zipped closed, with no hint of its contents visible. He watched Billy’s face closely for a reaction, but none was discernible, other than a calmer version of the same irritation he’d shown in the parking lot of the motel.
/> “I’ve never seen that before in my life,” Billy said. “What on earth does it have to do with me?”
“It was found up by Spirit Rock this afternoon by a boy looking for his lost dog,” Thomson said. “Constable McKitrick brought the boy back to town. Do you know what we found in inside?”
“I have absolutely no idea what you found inside it, sergeant,” Billy said. “Nor—and I know I’m repeating myself here, so forgive me—do I have any idea what any of it has to do with me.”
Thomson opened his desk drawer and withdrew a clean pair of latex gloves. He put them on and unzipped the bag. He withdrew the manuscript and held it up for Billy to see.
“Do you know what this is, Dr. Lightning?” Thomson said quietly.
Billy leaned forward in his seat and peered at the papers Thomson held in his hands. He looked confused for a moment, then he blanched. If the confusion was some sort of act, Thomson thought, it was a damn good act—better than any he’d seen, anywhere. When Billy spoke, his voice was hushed.
“Where did you get that?” he demanded. “Where the hell did you get that?”
“You recognize it, do you, Dr. Lightning?”
“It’s my . . . it’s my father’s manuscript.” As Billy stared at it, the look of bafflement on his face was replaced by one of dawning horror. “Is that blood on those pages?”
“I think so,” Thomson said in a neutral voice. “Blood, some mud. Grease. We haven’t had it tested yet—it was just found this afternoon. Do you know what else we found in the bag?”
Billy shook his head. Thomson beckoned him over and opened the flaps of the hockey bag. The stench that rose from the interior of the bag was thicker and greasier than it had been even a few hours earlier. Thomson felt his stomach lurch. The hammers and knives gleamed dull brown and silver in the overhead light of the police station.
Billy looked inside the bag, then vomited into the trash can next to Thomson’s desk. When he had finished retching, he stood up and steadied his hand on the side of the desk. “May I have a glass of water, please?”