She grabbed her jacket and ran upstairs. “Turn the Page” was sending a bass rumble through the door of Brian’s room. Instead of knocking, she darted into Eric’s bedroom, snatched the Galactica model, and stuffed it into her pocket.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
After physio, Lacey helped Dee into the Lexus.
“How come massages feel good, but physio is torture?” Dee groaned.
Lacey concentrated on the late-afternoon traffic. “That reception today. You had more of a chance than me to observe the Anders family dynamic. Anything seem odd to you?”
“Apart from how they’re all in shock and mourning?” Dee watched the crosswalk light count down the seconds. “The parents totally abdicated. Might as well not have been there at all. The neighbour seemed bossy, but the kids need someone to take charge.”
“The father’s attitude bugs me,” said Lacey. “It’s like he doesn’t care that his son is dead. You don’t suppose he was that pissed because Eric was going over to the enemy?”
Dee looked sideways. “The enemy?”
“Switching his major to Environmental Sciences. Isn’t that like treason to an oilman?”
“People in Alberta don’t kill their kids for having different points of view,” Dee said. “And don’t deny that’s what you were wondering. Although with all the parents freaking out over gay-straight alliances in schools and screaming ‘better dead than gay’ all over social media, you’re forgiven for thinking some parents would. Anyway, I don’t think Eric becoming an environmentalist would cause his father not to care that he’s dead. Brian’s utterly withdrawn from his whole family, and from the kids’ reactions today — or lack thereof — it seems like that’s their normal. Arliss Thompson would have a better idea of how they usually are. Or Zoe.”
“Did you ask her to come talk to your mom?”
“She doesn’t think she knows enough. She suggested we call Bethanne, the woman she talked to.” Dee gazed west as they left the last subdivision behind. “Look at that chinook arch over the mountains. It’s gonna be a lot warmer by morning.”
Sure enough, they soon drove into the first gusts of the weather front, and in the distance, spindrift stretched its ghostly fingers from the mountain peaks. The sun vanished behind the clouds. When they reached home, they could hear the dogs whining from their pen.
“Oh, poor boys,” Dee cooed. “This wind is getting in your ears, isn’t it? You want to come inside?”
Lacey unlatched the gate, and Boney and Beau followed Dee to the house. As they stepped inside, Marie scrambled up from a kitchen stool. She relaxed when she saw them.
“What happened?” Lacey asked.
“We’ve had an incident,” Marie explained. “Somebody came to the door about an hour ago and asked to take Sandy’s things. Loreena insisted on phoning her son to confirm. He told her he hadn’t sent anyone. I’d asked the person to wait outside while we checked, but when I got back to the door, they were gone.”
“Man or woman?”
“Woman, I think.” Marie held up her hand. “I can’t swear to that, though. They were stocky, a bit taller than me, and bundled to the eyebrows in a brown scarf and hat. Deepish voice, but that could have been put on.”
Dee dropped her face into her hands. “I can’t deal with another prowler on top of everything else.”
“It’s probably just a misunderstanding,” said Lacey. “I’ll go out and make sure they’re not hanging around still.”
“Take the dogs,” Dee said.
Boney and Beau leaped up hopefully, but Lacey shook her head. “They’ll trample any traces.”
Long blue shadows stretched over the snow, but the outside lights illuminated a set of footprints leading up the backyard. Lacey followed them, walking to one side to preserve the evidence. They’d be obliterated by morning, what with the wind picking up. She pulled her phone out and snapped a few photos of the clearest prints with her boot beside them for scale. Farther up the yard, indentations in the snow revealed someone had leaned skis and poles against a tree. Fresh ski tracks climbed the short slope to the trail that ran behind the houses. Using her phone’s flashlight, she followed them down the hill until they were so mixed with other tracks that she couldn’t be sure which were which.
She climbed back up to the house’s yard. Of course, the prowler would go that way. During last summer’s horrors, she’d examined every inch of the trails around here. Not only was there a road one steep ski down the back side of the hill, but the trail on this side crossed a lane not far down where a vehicle could be parked temporarily. She went inside and asked for a more thorough description of the visitor, but Marie couldn’t recall anything else of note.
“Sorry. I’ll leave you to it,” she said. “Good luck figuring this out.”
“The trails again,” Dee said after Marie left. “It has to be someone familiar with this neighbourhood.”
“Or someone who looked up your house on Google Maps, or saw some drone footage on a tourism website. In summer you can’t see the trails well from above, but a winter shot would show them clearly as white paths through the bare branches.” Lacey paced the kitchen and dining room, stopping to peer out the French doors. She automatically started the kettle for tea in passing. “I wish I knew what they were after. As far as I can tell, Sandy didn’t leave anything of value here.”
“The fact that they came at all …” Dee straightened. “Could it have been Sandy herself? Watching to see when we left, then sneaking up, hoping to get her stuff and just vanish?”
“Unless that cheap Santa Claus brooch she left has overwhelming sentimental value, there’s nothing worth the risk of coming back — if she’s trying to get away. I’ll call Bull and report a possible sighting, then run those last few things over to Dennis.”
Dee lurched. “Tonight?”
“The sooner the better, don’t you think? We don’t want to give anyone a reason to be sneaking around here again.”
“And how will they know the stuff’s gone?” Dee’s voice shook. “Come on, Lace, you can’t leave me here alone with Mom while someone is prowling around my house. It’s too much like what happened last spring. I can’t stay here alone. I just can’t.” The dogs circled her legs, whining.
“Lord Jesus, I forgot. Sorry. I won’t leave tonight.”
It wasn’t yet fully light when Lacey woke to her phone’s buzzing on the nightstand. She grabbed it, still half-asleep, fumbled it to the floor, and retrieved it, muttering, “This better be important.” A dial tone answered her. She hung up, and the chime for a voice mail sounded. She hit the button and put the phone to her ear. Calvin’s voice rattled off a phone number and a plea to not mention he was being investigated. Honestly, he had a snowball’s chance in hell of getting chosen for any sensitive government job. She rolled over and was trying to slide back into sleep when Tom’s voice came back to her. “He was in town to interview at the universities.” Dave from CSIS. She should have asked exactly when Tom had seen Dave. Wouldn’t that just frost the cookies if it turned out Calvin was not delusional? She rolled upright, listened to the message again, punched in the number, and waited.
“You’ve reached this number; please leave your reason for calling and a callback number.”
“My name is Lacey McCrae, and I need to confirm the whereabouts of a University of Calgary student named Calvin Chan on the Remembrance Day weekend. He gave this number for confirmation. If there’s anything you can tell me about Calvin, please phone me or call Sergeant Drummond of K Division, RCMP, Cochrane detachment.” She left her number and hung up.
Meanwhile, there was Sandy to follow up on. Overnight, while she’d lain awake yearning for a break from her continuing responsibilities, she’d had the persistent thought that the nurse might have disappeared deliberately, intending to be declared dead in the blizzard. That way, not only could she dodge any impending legal proceedings in Ontario, but also, her life insurance would pay out fairly soon, allowing her son to take care o
f his mortgage problems and probably get her a ticket out of the country. Lacey dragged herself out of bed. It was already ten a.m. in Ontario, late enough to call old Pat back and demand answers.
Before the coffee was ready, one of the dogs yipped happily out in the yard. She opened the mudroom door to a blast of spring-like air. Water dripped from the icicles along the pergola, and a scruffy man waited on the deck.
“Miz Lacey, good morning.” Eddie Beal’s earflaps were folded up, a concession to the chinook.
“Eddie? What are you doing here?”
“Egg day.”
“You were here last week.”
“Miz Dee phoned for more. Said she’d been at the Christmas baking.”
“Oh, that’s right. Come on in.”
“I can only spare a dozen. Lots of folks devil eggs for New Year’s.”
“I’m sure that will get us through to next week. There’s only three of us.”
“They ain’t found your car yet?” He caught her frown. “Heard it on the scanner yesterday. That nurse gone off with your car.”
“That she did.” As Lacey shut out the chilly morning, a thought hit her. Eddie Beal had lived here all his life. Although he was better with dogs than with people, there was a chance he could put a name to a description. “There’s a person she might have gone to see, but we don’t have a name. They met in the coffee shop by the grocery store before Christmas, and they hadn’t seen each other for years. Can you think of any woman around here about my height, maybe midfifties, stocky, with brown curly hair? Name of Darla or maybe Marlice.”
Eddie slurped his tongue over his front teeth. “Can’t say that any come to mind.” He handed over the eggs and made her sign the relevant line in his notebook. When she followed him out with the dogs’ kibble, he added, “You could ask that ski trekker woman. I seen her talking to the nurse one day in Cochrane.”
“What woman?”
“The one in the Backcountry booth beside me at the Cochrane Christmas market.”
“Yes, we were all at the market. We talked to quite a few people.”
“Not that day. Was a couple days later, near suppertime. I was heading home for chores, been up to see about some grow lights. Me and Eben are gonna set up a medical marijuana operation. We figure if we use solar and drop a micro-generator into our creek, power costs won’t—”
Lacey interrupted Eddie’s disquisition on pot-growing. “You saw Sandy, the nurse, talking to Marcia, the Backcountry ski instructor, in Cochrane one evening? Was this before Christmas?”
“Heck, yeah. Maybe the twenty-third, or was it Christmas Eve? Now, where was I comin’ from? Twenty-second was an egg day, exactly one week ago today, so not then…. Hmm.”
Eddie couldn’t narrow it down any further. After a bit, Lacey thanked him and sent him on his way. That day at the Christmas market, she and Dee had chatted with Eddie and then with Marcia. Had Sandy and Loreena been with them at that moment? It was possible Sandy had simply said hello to a familiar face in a strange town. But it had to be checked. She fed the dogs, topped up their heated water reservoir, scraped the slush away under the pergola, and schlepped back into the house.
The coffee was ready, and she poured a cup before dialling Zoe’s number. Hopefully she was up and not sleeping off the emotional upheaval of the funeral.
Zoe answered on the third ring. After hearing Lacey’s brief explanation of the missing nurse and the need to reach Marcia, she said, “I’ve got her email address if that’s any help. Or, both her numbers will be in the office directory. I’ll call you with them when I get to work. Half an hour or so? She might even be there when I arrive.”
“Thanks.” Lacey signed off and called Dennis. As soon as she was sure Dee felt okay being left alone, she’d take Sandy’s stuff back to him.
But he threw her a curveball with his first words. “I found an email from my mom.”
“Where is she? Is she all right?”
He huffed. “Not like that. She didn’t email me. She emailed Pat from my Gmail account. While she was here, I mean. I musta left it open, and she just started typing without realizing. Pat’s address is in my Gmail, too, so it woulda filled in.”
“When did she send it? What does it say?”
“Uh, hang on.” He shuffled around. “It was Boxing Day, before she left here. It just says ‘She’ll pay.’”
“That’s it? A single line?”
“Uh-huh. Three exclamation marks. Maybe Pat knows what’s going on.”
“She wouldn’t tell me why your mother left that nursing home where she used to work.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I don’t know, but your mother was out with Loreena that one time when they met a woman she knew from that nursing home. It’s the only lead we’ve got.”
“Oh, yeah. I still don’t know who that coulda been. I’ll ask my wife when she gets home. Her and Mom natter on for hours about stuff like that.” He paused. “You thank Loreena for that money she sent. It will help out a lot.”
“She’s worried about Sandy, too. We all are.” No need to mention her half-formed suspicion that Sandy was escaping from pending legal troubles in Ontario. “Now about that nursing home. Why did your mom stop working there?”
“Pissed at the management is all I heard. She seemed happy doing visiting nurse stuff.”
“Call me if you find anything else. Like your mom’s Gmail password scribbled on a sticky note by your computer.”
“Only old people do that.”
One old person, for sure. “I’ll try Pat. If she’s checked her email by now, she may know what that message referred to.” Lacey pulled up Pat’s daughter’s number in her contacts list and punched it into the wall phone. She went through a child, then her mother before finally reaching Pat. “Did you get any emails from Sandy?”
“I haven’t been home to check yet.” Pat had abandoned the creaky, uncertain tone today. “My idiot grandson ditched his mother’s car half a mile from here and left it in water over the radiator all night, probably because he’d been drinking. Block’s frozen solid. His dad’s gonna have to tow it back here after work and thaw it out. He oughta be grounded for a year. Don’t you worry, though. I’ll go right home and look for emails as soon as that car’s sorted out.”
Lacey started to fortify herself with a swallow of coffee, but discovered her mug was down to the dregs. “Sandy sent you a message from her son’s account, saying ‘She’ll pay.’ Did she mean someone was willing to pay her for something, or was she going to make someone pay, as in get revenge on them?”
“Lord love you, young woman, I have no idea. She’ll have emailed me another time or two with details. Someone can run me over soon to find out.”
“This will be the third day she’s been missing. That woman she knew from the nursing home is the only lead I have. Please, even if you don’t think it could possibly be relevant, tell me what happened to make Sandy leave her job.”
“Oh, dear,” said Pat, lapsing into her little-old-lady voice. “I hoped that was all over and done with. What I remember is a bit shaky. I didn’t understand all the ins and outs.”
“Do the best you can.”
“All right, then. The manager found some kind of computer virus thing that was stealing money from the home’s expenses, and Sandy took the blame for it.”
“She planted a virus that stole money?”
Pat clucked. “She could no more do that than I can check my email from a strange computer. Two lost lambs, that’s us in this electronic age. No, she took the blame for it. That’s a whole different thing. The real culprit was a summer student, but he was the nephew of the owner. Nothing was going to happen to him. The home couldn’t get the money back from their insurance without assigning blame. So the manager offered Sandy severance and a reference if she’d take responsibility and go away quietly.”
“That sounds nuts.”
“She didn’t like it as much there without me, and sh
e got on at the home care place pretty quick. We were both really mad about that bad flu year, though. No excuse at all. And she had to repay some of the severance as pretend restitution.”
“What had the bad flu to do with the virus?”
“Nothing, really. Sandy hated watching the old dears come down with the flu and not understand what was happening to them, dying in agony when a flu shot might have saved them.” Pat clucked her tongue again. “People with dementia are still people. They deserve a good quality of life, and that includes flu shots and other protections. The home was getting a lot of questions because of a run of deaths — three times the provincial average in that one winter, if you can believe it — and a financial scandal on top of it could’ve put the place out of business. Sandy took the blame so the old folks wouldn’t get even more confused by being moved out among strangers. And to save everyone else’s jobs.”
“That’s very noble of her.” Lacey hoped her skepticism wasn’t creeping through. So, computers stealing money showed up in both Eric’s life and Sandy’s. Was there a connection between the two disappearances?
Sandy had no connection to TFB Energy, though. That malware had to have been planted by someone who could walk right up to the cheque printer and plug in a USB drive. It couldn’t possibly be the same malware, either, four years and four provinces apart. Still, she had to check.
“Er, what kind of virus was it that Sandy took the blame for? Did it involve printing cheques?”
Pat’s voice rose. “Now how did you know that? I barely remembered it myself.”
“Lucky guess. Did you ever hear if it had a name? Or a number?”
“If I did hear, it’s clean gone now. You won’t go repeating this, will you? Sandy did nothing wrong, and I won’t have her reputation sullied while she’s not able to defend herself.”
Where the Ice Falls Page 21