“I didn’t leave the cell open, sir.”
His shoulders sagged. “You know what? I don’t care.” He lowered his voice. “One way or another, she’s not going to be my problem.”
“Sir.”
He raised sausagey fingers and ticked off two alternatives with a thumb. “You catch up with her, put her back in a cell, nothing happened, it’s nobody’s problem. Or she shows up somewhere, you were the duty officer, it’s your problem. That’s how it’s going to be.”
“Sir.”
“Anything else?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. Twenty-nine hours.”
“Plenty of time,” she said, suddenly tired of being dutiful. “Sir.”
He frowned. Her being spunky wasn’t in the script. “Yeah,” he said, groping for a rejoinder he wasn’t quick-witted enough to find. “Let’s hope it is.” But he closed the door on her quickly, as if he wanted to escape before she could answer back.
• • •
No one had seen anything. If Alice had been a different kind of town she might have suspected that people were holding back, closing ranks against an outsider. But the conversations generally went like this:
“Good morning, ma’am. I’m sorry to trouble you at home. I’m Constable Maculloch with the RCMP. Would it be all right if I asked you a couple of questions?”
“Oh, you’re the new Mountie!”
“That’s right, ma’am. I—”
“Hey! How d’you like it up here?”
“It’s good. Could—”
“Quiet, eh? Heh heh.”
“Sure is.”
“So they sent a girl up, eh? We never had a girl Mountie before. Can I offer you a coffee?”
“Thank you, ma’am, but I’m just making some inquiries—”
“Something going on? That makes a change. Heh heh. Sure about that coffee? I made hotcakes.”
“Can you tell me if you’ve been outside in the last hour, ma’am? Or even looking outside?”
“You mean like in the yard? What’s going on? I didn’t hear anything.”
“It’s just a routine inquiry, ma’am.”
“Well, you certainly have nice manners. Bit of an accent there, eh? You sound like a French girl. Yeah, I probably looked outside once or twice. Think I saw the other side of the street. Heh heh.”
And so on. She gave up after a while and left the door-to-doors to Jonas, but by that time word had gotten out that the police were looking for someone and she couldn’t get out of the patrol car without people zeroing in on her to ask about it. By the time she drove up to the mill the security guy had already heard there was a dangerous vagabond on the loose. He stared down the road, narrowed his eyes like Clint Eastwood, and nodded to himself as he reassured her. “Yep. If he comes this way I’ll get him.” It was his hour of need. He tucked his shirt in accordingly.
She thought about the possibilities. It was less and less plausible that the kid was hiding out in town somewhere. But where else could she have gone? And this bugged her the more she thought about it, why?
“She ever try to escape before?”
“Man, I dunno. Not that I ever heard.”
“She wasn’t in custody all along, was she? I heard they sent her home for a while, right? And there was that deal with the First Nations band, they were going to put her on an island or something. Like tribal justice.”
“Yeah. They tried that.” Jonas was back in the patrol car, at the bottleneck, coffee on the dashboard, windows rolled up to deter the curious.
“So it wasn’t exactly maximum security.”
“Girl’s never been convicted of anything.”
“What I’m saying is, if she wanted to run for it, she could have. Any time.”
“Nowhere to go, man. Nowhere to go.”
“That’s what I mean. So where’s she gone now?”
Jonas wasn’t the sort to waste his carefully hoarded thinking energy on hypotheticals. He didn’t even bother to shrug. Goose understood why he loved fishing so much. Waiting, waiting, until the fish took the bait all by itself.
“Cope kind of implied my job’s on the line.”
“Aw. He can’t do that. Can’t be discharged for a mistake.”
“I didn’t make a mistake.”
He cocked a finger and shot her with it. “You betcha.”
“I didn’t, Jonas. You know it’s not possible anyway. You know how security works in the back. I’d have had to hold the door open while she walked out. Like, After you.”
“Yep.”
“You think that’s what I did?”
“Nope.”
A truck chugged up. Jonas flagged it down, asked a few questions, shot the breeze. The guy knew him, of course, and had heard there was a drug dealer from down-island on the run (of course). He’d kept his eyes open. He hadn’t seen anything.
“She’s got to have run off into the woods somewhere,” Goose said, as her colleague settled himself back into place behind the wheel. “Unless the accomplice got her in a car and got away. In which case they’re long gone by now.”
“Possibilities.” Jonas sighed. He could have been agreeing or disagreeing.
“The thing is, she’s got to end up somewhere, right? So where else can we look? Can I look.”
“I’m gonna help you out.”
“Cope told you not to, didn’t he.”
“Hey.” Jonas was unperturbed. “Using my own initiative. It’s good policing.”
“I appreciate it. I’m thinking you should stay here anyway, though. If anyone comes up with anything in town, they’re going to tell you right away. I’m not getting anywhere by knocking on doors. I need to figure out where she’s headed.”
Jonas waved at the view ahead, the twenty or so arcing and intersecting streets in their small bowl at the edge of the inlet, hemmed in by steep forested mountains. Stripes of cloud in varying grey lay snugly over them like a quilt. It was midafternoon, not that there was much of a change in the light above or the activity below. School was out; the brief afternoon migration of strollers to and from Alice Elementary was already complete. There were about twenty-four hours before the ferry that was supposed to carry her and Jennifer up to the remote north would steam out of Hardy.
“Big island,” he said.
“Can you do me a favor?”
“Sure thing.”
“Can you get me her file?”
“Oh, man.”
“Please, Jonas?”
“It’s like two boxes.”
“I’m not asking you to carry it over Thirty by foot. Come on. You can stick it in the back of the car. How hard is that?”
“I dunno, Goose.”
“I’m serious. I can’t go over to Hardy—Cope’ll freak if he finds out. No one would bother you over there. Later on. Please? I want to see if there’s something in there. Might give me a handle on what she’s up to.”
“Goose. They had a hundred doctors and lawyers trying to figure out what she’s up to. It was on TV.”
“Come on, Jonas. This could be my career, you know?”
“What, you’re afraid they’re gonna post you somewhere less important than this?”
“Could be worse. Could be Manitoba.”
He did his version of a chuckle, a slow soundless bobbing of the head.
“I’m not going to spend the night covering the forest with a flashlight,” she went on, already sensing he was going to agree. They’d only been working together a few days, but already they’d struck up that tacit agreement to cooperate, the first silent sign that each thought the other was basically okay. “If we haven’t found her by now, we’re not going to find her when it gets dark, are we? I might as well look for a different angle.”
“Whoa.” He sipped coffee. “Sherlock.”
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“You can get it, buddy. After hours. It’ll be quiet enough in the station over there; you can sign it out without any fuss.”
“Okeydokey. No problem.”
“My hero.” She swung herself out of the patrol car. “I’ll go take another look around. Jonas?”
“Yup?”
“You don’t seriously think I screwed up, do you? You meant that?”
“Cross my heart.”
“How’d you think she got out, then?”
He shook his head.
“Come on. You must think something.”
He stretched his right arm into the space she’d just vacated and rolled his neck, unstiffening. “Some things,” he said calmly, as if he were holding the line still, waiting for explanations to impale themselves on the unseen hook in the ocean of darkness below, “you just don’t know how they happen.”
5
It was the theme of The Case of Jennifer Knox. Except that in Jennifer’s case the policemen and doctors and lawyers weren’t like Jonas, content to see what they might fish up, almost equally content if they went home empty-handed. They wanted to know.
It was their job to want to know. The file—a single thick folder of papers and CDs, strapped with a rubber band; Jonas had exaggerated—was the record of their efforts to know. Goose spread the papers and disks over her bed and sat cross-legged among them in a big baggy T-shirt, the Anglepoise lamp coming over her shoulder like an eavesdropper, her laptop half tucked under the pillow. She skimmed the legalese, tried a bit harder with the medical stuff, and read the police material carefully. An oceanic darkness flowed out of all of them, the unplumbed depths of Jen’s silence.
Take that away and the case didn’t look all that complicated. The initial police reports were brusque, routine. Constable Fitzgerald might be a dumbass, but the report he’d signed off on was entirely competent. He’d observed the protocols. Everything was in the proper order, all the relevant details were there. On the night of 1 December the police had been called to the Knox family home in Rupert, the no-horse town just down the coast from Hardy, known only to its mostly First Nations inhabitants plus a smattering of people who turned the wrong way coming out of the airport. The call had come from Patience Knox, the mother; the report described her as “incoherent.” Fitzgerald arrived at the house a little after one a.m. and found the front door broken in, evidence of damage to the interior of the property, the oldest child, Carl, lying dead at the bottom of the staircase, the mother hysterical; the second child, Jennifer, was unconscious in a room at the top of the stairs; and the two younger children (one handicapped and the other an infant) were screaming. There were lots of photos on a disk. Goose slotted it into her laptop, and after some fiddling around, there the dead boy was, and the smashed door and the staircase, all bleached by the camera flash and eerily silent, the screaming and hysteria left to her imagination. Carl had broken his neck, presumably by falling down the stairs. It took half an hour of coaxing and coffee for the mother to calm down and sober up enough to give a proper statement, but once she’d given her story she stuck by it. It was straightforward enough. She’d driven back from a bar in Hardy to find the outside light and the door broken. She ran into the house and heard a commotion upstairs. (“Commotion” was a good report word. Goose had typed it out a few times herself.) She saw Carl dead and thought someone was attacking the other kids. She heard Jennifer calling for her so she ran up. The door to her bedroom was barricaded. Jennifer was shouting in there, but Ms. Knox couldn’t get in, so she went to fetch her phone from the truck and called the police. By the time she got back upstairs the door was no longer blocked and Jennifer was lying inside more or less as Fitzgerald found her ten minutes or so later. (The report noted that there was no lock on the door, no sign the bed had been moved, and nothing else in the room substantial enough to use as a barricade.)
Plenty of witnesses confirmed that Ms. Knox had left the bar when she said she had, and a couple of neighbors reported hearing the commotion; they were used to the kids shouting and the mother coming home drunk late at night, and ignored it. The damage to the door and the exterior of the property—a scrap heap, basically; the pictures alone were enough to suggest why none of the neighbors wanted anything to do with the Knox family—was consistent with a break-in. Ms. Knox was adamant that if there’d been an intruder in the bedroom with Jennifer when she arrived, there was no way he could have left the house without her seeing, even while she went to phone the police. Fitzgerald, however, noted that Ms. Knox was “severely intoxicated” when he arrived.
So far so good. The picture was as clear to Goose as it had been to Fitzgerald and, later, to Staff Sergeant Cope. Someone had broken into the house, waking the children. The boy Carl had come out of the kids’ bedroom to investigate, tripped, and gone down the stairs. The guy had taken Jennifer into the bedroom and blocked the door. The mother had come back, interrupting him; he’d scrammed without being seen. It was inconvenient, admittedly, that the police found no footprints or tire marks around the house beyond those made by themselves and Ms. Knox, and that later examination failed to turn up any evidence of an intruder inside the house, except for two burned-out matches on the floor of the bedroom. (“Of unknown provenance,” said the report; that had to be the sarge writing. Goose could see him peering over his glasses, tapping out the fancy words.) But with the police and the ambulance coming and going and the mother with the baby and the younger boy going up and down the house screaming, it wasn’t hard to see how any traces might have been erased in the first few minutes. Anyway, they had enough to go on. Jennifer was, understandably, traumatized, but she’d been in the room with the guy and would be able to ID him in due course. Take out the unfortunate death of the kid and the general melodrama surrounding the family and Goose could see how they’d all expected the case to be pretty uncomplicated.
The first sign of trouble was in the hospital report dated 3 December, two days later. The phrase looked confident, professional, doctorish: acute post-traumatic aphasia.
Put like that, it sounded as if you could operate on it, or prescribe a drug. Have you got something for acute post-traumatic aphasia? But what it meant was that Jennifer Knox wouldn’t speak.
Not a single word, not even the beginning of a word. Not to anyone—police, nurses, doctors, friends, her mother. She wouldn’t draw, or sing, or hum, or nod, or any of those things you could sometimes get traumatized kids to do when they didn’t want to talk. She sat up when the nurse asked her to sit up, she let the doctor examine her, she let her mother hug her. She ate, she got dressed and undressed. She listened and understood, apparently. She’d look you in the eye. But she wouldn’t say anything at all.
Problem.
It was apparent from the early reports that she was their only hope of a decent witness. The family was a mess. (“Highly unstable domestic environment”—Cope again, Goose reckoned.) The younger boy was developmentally disabled—code for something, obviously, though Goose wasn’t sure exactly what—and the mother was an alcoholic. Without Jennifer’s testimony the prospects of finding out what had happened in the house that night were severely reduced. On top of that there’d been no progress in identifying a suspect. A couple of guys who had some history with the mother and plenty of bad stuff on their records both had unbreakable alibis. More inconvenient still, Patience Knox’s evidence about what she’d heard from the barricaded bedroom began to change. Right from the start this had been a minor but irritating weakness in the case: her description of the so-called commotion hadn’t really made it sound like someone suffering an assault, sexual or otherwise. According to Fitzgerald, her exact words had been that the girl was “up there screaming nonsense . . . crazy shit.” Later in the night she’d given a more sober statement to the sarge, in which she said, “First Jennifer called out to me and then she started shouting stuff, I don’t know what it was, she’d gone crazy. I thought she was crazy.” Three
days later she was telling the police what they’d like to have heard all along: that Jennifer had been shouting for help and asking her to call the cops. She wasn’t able to explain the contradiction.
The Kwakiutl Band got involved. There was the documentation, on shakily photocopied headed paper, signed by their community liaison officer, a round, bespectacled woman whom Goose had already met. Up at this end of Vancouver Island the police spent a lot of time talking with First Nations community liaison officers of one sort or another, because 90 percent of the young men they had to lock up overnight were First Nations kids. The Band had their own procedures—“traditional justice” was the official phrase—and they requested that Jennifer be put in their care for a few days, even though no one had accused her of anything. They weren’t required to tell the police exactly what happened, but Goose understood it involved taking the kids off somewhere and having them live in supervised isolation. Plus some ceremonies. That kind of thing. By that stage the sarge was only too happy to try anything.
Jennifer went away wherever they took her and came back, still without saying anything at all to anyone.
She attended her brother’s funeral. That was when the media got interested.
It was a single photo that kicked off the whole circus. The shot showed the grieving family, the mother crying, holding the fragile-looking younger boy by the hand, and Jennifer off to the side, looking utterly blank, hard, cold, but also, unfortunately, pretty. Just pretty enough to catch everyone’s interest, once you factored in the piquant detail that whatever happened to her had struck her mute.
Goose remembered her first contact with the story. She was in Victoria. She’d come home after a cold wet day inspecting illegal fishing catches, turned on the news, and there it was: The Girl Who Won’t Talk.
Now the case became a medium-sized event. There was serious pressure to make an arrest. An inspector came from down-island. He tried to interview Jennifer. The documentation was on one of the disks; the file name was almost longer than the content of the file. His report read, in full: Subject unable or unwilling to cooperate. Full psychiatric evaluation recommended. The girl was sent to a bigger hospital. Meanwhile, Cope was getting nowhere, and there was a TV crew camped in the Hardy Motor Inn.
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