Anarchy

by James Treadwell

  • • •

  She was going to stop for a while at Traders to refuel on coffee and a doorstop sandwich. The place was unexpectedly crowded, though, and everyone wanted to talk. Getting away was less complicated than she’d at first feared once it became clear that the person they really wanted to talk to was Jonas. They were quite ready to believe that she didn’t know anything. She was still a down-islander, or an off-islander, or even a kind of foreigner. Most of them were there because the mill had cut production for the day, leaving them with nothing to do.

  She drove over 30 toward Hardy. It was true, she thought to herself, that she didn’t know anything. But she knew what she’d seen.

  She had a while before her overnight duty began. The sensible thing would have been to rest, but she still felt like she might never need sleep again. She parked at the hospital instead and went in to ask about the boy.

  They wouldn’t let her see him. He’d had to be sedated. They hadn’t been able to get him to eat or drink, so he was on a drip. The doctor’s main concern was how they were going to get rid of him.

  “Do you have an ID for him yet?”

  “Just that name,” Goose said.

  He looked at his notes. “Jia. Chinese name. There’s probably ten thousand Jias in Vancouver alone. That number could be Los Angeles too. I don’t like to guess how many Jias there are in L.A.”

  “What number?”

  The doctor snapped his notes away impatiently. “Haven’t you even tried it yet?”

  “I haven’t been directly involved in this case. Do you mean a phone number?”

  “Hang on,” the doctor said, and left the room, returning a minute later with a small Ziploc bag. “I thought you people would have taken this away by now. The nurse found this in the inside pocket of his jacket.”

  Inside the bag was a laminated rectangle the size of a business card, wrinkled and blotched, moldy at the edges. She took it out and held it under the light. It had been written on in neat, fussy print. The letters were quite clear despite the fading and staining: home number, they read. The string of numbers below was a little harder to decipher, but far from obscure.

  “It shouldn’t take long to track him down,” the doctor said. “Should it? I bet his mom did that.”

  “What’s that area code,” Goose said, squinting at the first three numbers. “Oh one eight?”

  He took a turn peering. “That’s what I thought at first. Must be eight one eight. That’s L.A. I checked.”

  “Has someone tried it?”

  “I’d say that’s your job. You want to take this? We have his clothes too.”

  She copied the number instead. Someone else would be responsible for the case; she’d leave the grumpy doctor for them to deal with.

  “Oh one eight’s not an area code,” he said, watching her make her note. “It’s probably an eight. Or I guess it could be a nine, there’s that little bit there.”

  “Or it’s not a U.S. or Canadian number.”

  The doctor obviously hadn’t thought of that. “It’s written in English.”

  Even the suggestion of a dispute about language raised particularly unpleasant specters from her childhood. Her memories of the months leading up to her parents’ divorce were of an insane linguistic retrenchment. She didn’t remember the recriminations and insults themselves; she just recalled the horror of Dad refusing to say a word in French and Mom refusing (beyond the word fuck and its variants) to say a word in English. She promised the doctor she’d get back to him with whatever progress they made on identifying the boy, and made a businesslike exit. And it was indeed her intention to talk to whoever was dealing with the case as soon as she got to the station, because the doctor was of course right, she couldn’t believe it would take long to track the kid down after he’d so conveniently provided them with his name and phone number, and she was eager—very eager—to know who he was and where he’d come from; but she’d barely walked in the door when Janice (who shouldn’t have been there on a Saturday anyway) gave a flustered screech of relief at the sight of her—“Marie!”—and sent her down to the dock to meet Jonas, and the coast guard vessel, and the ferry, which should have arrived at eleven o’clock that morning. “Oh, those poor people,” she said, waving Goose outside. “Those poor people.”

  12

  There were no people. The people had vanished.

  A young coast guard officer met her at the ferry dock. The two of them put up a police line across the off ramp to keep the small but intensely agitated crowd away from the vessel, and stayed ashore to protect it while his colleagues and Jonas worked their way through the ferry, looking for some clue as to what had happened. He told her the story while they waited.

  The coast guard had made contact with the ferry early that morning, as soon as the navigation markers in the Passage failed. Their own satellite navigation had gone down not long afterward. In the fog there’d been nothing they could do except cut speed to a crawl and use charts and compass reckoning to try to work their way into the Passage, looking for a safe harbor. The last they’d heard from the ferry was the captain announcing that he was going to assist a small craft in distress. He’d thought it might be the lifeboat from the Irkutsk Star. The airwaves were full of confused shipping; they’d lost touch with the ferry until Jonas radioed in to say he’d found it off course, drifting, idling, dangerously near the islands at the entrance to the Queen Charlotte Strait. By early afternoon the fog had cleared enough for them to make their way to the spot. They went aboard and found no one. No crew, no passengers. The manifest was in the purser’s office; twenty-six truckers and forty-three other travelers had boarded the ferry in Prince Rupe for the overnight journey. Their coats and magazines and snack wrappers were spread around the seats, their cars and trucks and campers were in the vehicle hold, their change was in the cafeteria till. They themselves were gone. The young officer was visibly shaken as he described it.

  “Lifeboats?” she asked.

  “Not touched. The alarm didn’t sound. It gets logged automatically. It’s like they all just . . .”

  Just what? She tried to imagine what it must have been like for Jonas, first aboard.

  “Jumped in the sea. It’s like . . .”

  He couldn’t say what it was like. He was surprisingly fresh-faced for a coastguardsman but he had the look of someone who’d been digging bodies out of the rubble of an earthquake. She looked at the ferry, a disproportionately large silhouette in this town where everything that wasn’t a parking facility was on a reduced scale. Its lights were on. Its engines rumbled contentedly. The coast guard guys had brought it in themselves.

  “Fire?” she suggested.

  “That’s the first thing you check for. We went all over the engine rooms. Nothing. No problems.”

  The peculiar restfulness she’d enjoyed all day was bleeding out as the invisible sun went down. The usual evening murk was spreading quickly.

  “Freaky,” she said.

  He nodded vigorously and gestured toward the clump of spectators gathered beyond the tape. “We’re going to have to tell them something soon. Some of them are family.”

  Oh God, she thought, please let them not make me do that just because I’m the woman. “What have you said so far?”

  “Emergency. Accident aboard. Investigating. That stuff.”

  A shout came from the bright open maw behind them. Another uniformed man stood at the top of the off ramp, motioning to his colleague.

  “You better stay here,” the young officer said, and went to answer.

  As soon as they saw she was on her own, the crowd began to call to her. She clenched her jaw, took a few deep breaths, tried to remember her training, and went to say what she thought she could say. She saw the emotions on people’s faces, written as plainly as the most compulsive emotions always were, the ones no one could do anything about: shock, f
ear, grief.

  Everyone was still talking all at once and she’d barely begun to prepare the ground when a woman pointed over her shoulder and said, “There’s someone!”

  They all fell silent, Goose with them as she turned to look. The front of the ferry was open, a wide gate in the increasing darkness, and a few figures had gathered there, among them (she saw) Jonas, bigger and sturdier than the rest. All were in uniform except one, a long-haired thin silhouette whom Jonas seemed to be guiding by the shoulders. A blanket had been wrapped over her shoulders and her head was bowed; she went unsteadily, in small shuffling steps. An older woman, it looked like, except that her hair was very dark, and (Goose now saw, as the group came slowly down the ramp, into the brutal glow of the dock’s lamps) extraordinarily long, reaching to her hips.

  “Maculloch?” It was Jonas, shouting. He was too good a pro to call her Goose in front of a crowd.

  “What?”

  “Clear those folks back, would you?”

  Everyone started yelling. Fortunately for her they weren’t angry yet; they were still at the stage of stunned pliability. She kept talking as she cleared a route to the patrol cars, always slightly more loudly and sharply than anyone else was talking, always pushing a little more firmly than anyone else pushed. It was only difficult for the first little while. As the group led by Jonas came closer the anxious crowd fell silent again, one by one, and a collective look came over them that Goose could not identify at all.

  Jonas was escorting a painfully thin, painfully hunched blind woman. She clutched the blanket they’d given her tight at her neck, and her head stayed bowed so that her lank and matted hair covered most of her face, but her skin was so pale that the blot on that face was unmistakable, the thick band of black between white forehead and white mouth. A scarf or blindfold or bandage was wrapped over her eyes.

  “Easy,” Jonas was murmuring. “Eaaasy. Okay. Nearly there now.” The crowd had fallen so quiet everyone could hear every long syllable, and every shuffling footstep as well. The blind woman wore dark boots. She was not old.

  Jonas raised his head to Goose for a moment. He looked like an entirely different person: stricken, exhausted.

  “Hold the fort,” he said, nodding back toward the ferry. He shepherded the woman into the back of a patrol car and was gone.

  • • •

  It was some two hours before relief arrived; Cope himself and one of the corporals. The crowd had gone by then. She’d had to stop a couple of people who’d tried to force their way aboard. The senior coastguardsman had come out and given a statement to the effect that everyone known to have boarded the vessel was now considered missing. There’d been a very small, very ineffectual riot immediately after that. It kept her warm, at least. Once they’d all gone it was just her on the tarmac under the lights, the air like stop-motion spray against her skin.

  Cope rolled over and stood beside her, looking at the ferry. From time to time they caught sight of the coast guard guys working their way from deck to deck, shining torches into the cabs of the trucks. The corporal, whose name Goose couldn’t remember, came to join them.

  “Good job, Maculloch.”

  “Thank you, sir.” She wasn’t sure what Cope was referring to.

  The sarge sighed heavily. “What a day. What a goddam day.” He kicked a stone across the empty queuing lanes. “Anything I need to know about?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “All right. That’s one piece of good news, anyway.”

  “Is the passenger all right?”

  He frowned at her.

  “The passenger, sir. Jonas escorted a woman off the vessel.”

  “We don’t know if she’s a passenger or not. Hasn’t said a damn thing. She might be a deaf mute stowaway.” He tugged to loosen his collar. “Sitting there like a hunk of wood. Gives me the creeps. You know what, Maculloch, you ought to try. Use your woman’s touch. Or maybe she speaks French.”

  “Try what?” She hoped he was joking.

  “See if you can figure out who she is, what the hell she was doing aboard that ship.”

  “I thought Jonas—”

  “Yeah. You’d think, wouldn’t you? I mean, who wouldn’t talk to Jonas?”

  Jennifer Knox. Goose felt a chill.

  “Is she in the station?”

  “I didn’t know what the hell else to do with her. Christ. I’m glad I’m not on duty overnight. Who’s on tonight?”

  “Me, sir.”

  “Oh.” He looked away. “Okay. Well, just remember that woman’s a suspect until we have any information suggesting otherwise.”

  “A suspect in . . .”

  “Christ, Maculloch.” He waved an arm at the bulk of the ferry. “This. Whatever this is. We’ve got eighty-odd people unaccounted for and one person at the scene.”

  “A blind deaf mute?”

  “You know something, Maculloch? My tolerance is running a little low right now.”

  “Sorry. I guess it just seems weird.”

  “You think? Anyway. Weird or not, as of right now we’ve got jack else to go on, all right? So let’s try and make sure she doesn’t up and go walking out of the station on your watch. Hmm?”

  For a moment she was too angry to speak. Whether he was joking or not—and now she thought he wasn’t; now she thought his gruff banter was really just bullying, plain and simple—she didn’t care.

  “Can I go, sir?”

  “You do that. Go get some coffee. And have a good night.”

  “Thank you. Oh, sir?”

  “What?”

  “I was sorry to hear about Fitzgerald.”

  The sarge looked away. “We all were.”

  “His dad thinks the girl put a curse on him.”

  “What?”

  “It’s nothing. Good night.”

  • • •

  She was off duty till ten. Enough time to cross back over to Alice if she’d wanted to, but instead she got hot drinks and cold food from one of the malls, drove a kilometer or two out of town, and sat in her car by the side of the road. People had stopped her in the mall. One half-toothless old guy as good as chased her down the dairy aisle. “Is this the big one?” he kept asking. “Are we done for?” Strange, she thought, how the town somehow went on functioning in its sad and boring way at the same time as people started to go crazy. There were women in the market with kids in the seat of their carts, and they were buying tacos and baby formula, and the town’s teenagers were still out on the sidewalks walking or skateboarding up and down in their little packs the way they always did, while at the same time the fuel truck hadn’t arrived and things they all took for granted suddenly couldn’t be counted on and the ferry had turned into the Mary Celeste. Canada, like everywhere else, had secretly found it difficult not to laugh at the Brits. England! Of all the people in the world you’d have picked to go collectively insane, the corgi-loving tea-drinking stiff-upper-lip Brits would be at the very bottom of the list. But now she thought she understood how it might have happened, how everything could simultaneously be normal and . . . not. She’d do her shift and then go home and (fingers crossed) sleep and get up and brush her teeth the next morning, and then she’d do whatever the next thing was, maybe unpack the last few boxes, and then the next, and so on, whatever else might be happening out there in the darkness and the fog.

  Wouldn’t she?

  • • •

  The Hardy detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police consisted of fifteen officers. Three of them were on duty that evening; herself, Kalmykov, and Wardley. It was the first time she’d done a shift in Hardy. It was much more like an office than the Alice station, which was for most practical purposes an extension of Jonas’s living room. It smelled of uniforms and cleaning products. The light was harsher. The sarge’s office at the back was glassed in, half-hidden by cheap blinds, l
ike a crummy executive bolthole.

  In a deep chair in his office sat the blind woman, back straight, head bent slightly forward. Wardley leaned against the counter next to Goose and stared at her through the blinds.

  “She’s hardly moved.”

  Goose didn’t want to stare but couldn’t help herself. The office door was closed. The woman couldn’t possibly hear them, or (of course) see them; the chair she sat in was turned away, so they were looking at her in profile, and her witchy hair hid most of her face; nevertheless, Goose couldn’t shake the feeling that the woman could feel their tactless scrutiny.

  “She’ll take a drink now and then.” Someone had put a coffee and a couple of cookies on the corner of the desk by the chair. “That’s about it. Except if you put your hands near her face, then she’ll move. Oh yeah.”

  “Who tried that?”

  “Paul. He wanted to get a better look at her, get a photo for ID.”

  “Did we get one?”

  “I think so. The camera’s still in there. And I don’t mind saying, you can get it yourself. Okay, look, here she goes. Watch this.”

  The woman reached for her drink. Her hands were pale and bony and not so much wrinkled as shriveled, as if the skin had shrunk in the wash. They closed around the mug, held it, lifted. She tipped her head down and instead of drinking sniffed the coffee. Goose thought she saw her nostrils flare.

  “Watch what?”

  “I don’t know.” Wardley was almost whispering. “It doesn’t look right when she does that.”

  Blind people were supposed to have their other senses highly developed. There was something too intense about the way she held the mug under her nose, very still, as if the question of whether she could drink it or not was a matter for careful meditation.

  She opened her lips, bent a little more, and was about to sip. She stopped halfway through the motion, her bottom lip just touching the edge of the mug. Goose suddenly felt as though she were watching some weird piece of abstract theater, the kind of stuff Annie’s friends were into.