The Dead Letter

by Finley Martin

  Jacqui pushed through the curtain to Anne’s bed.

  “How’s Rada?” asked Anne.

  “Her father picked her up,” said Jacqui. She sounded disheartened. Anne’s natural instinct was to somehow spring Jacqui from her blue mood, but Anne had no energy for it now. She had her own mudhole to wade through. So, for a long while, both women remained silently together, each retiring within her own contemplation and solitude.

  Numerous minutes passed. Finally, Anne could stand it no more. Her stillness, her self-pity, her inaction overcame her. She felt as if she were being buried under their stifling weight. She sprang up. A wave of dizziness struck her but quickly passed.

  “Jacqui, hand me my clothes.”

  The sharpness in Anne’s voice roused Jacqui from her self-indulgent reverie. She handed them to her mother, and Anne began to dress.

  “And where are we going in such a rush?”

  Dr. Peter T. Little passed through the curtain veil into Anne’s cubicle and nearly tripped over Jacqui who had squatted down to retrieve her mother’s shoes. Jacqui glanced up and saw an owl. Dr. Little was a short, wiry man with a ruddy complexion and short red hair. His round eyes looked through round, wire-framed spectacles. They fixed on Anne.

  “Time to go. I’m feeling much better now.”

  “Sorry. Can’t let you go.” Little spoke coolly and decisively.

  “Why not?”

  “A couple of reasons. First of all, you’ll scare the devil out of hospital visitors.”

  Anne stared back with a puzzled expression. Dr. Little stuck out his arm and pointed.

  “First, the blood all over your jacket and blouse. Second, you smell like a jumble of fuel oil and Girl Guide campfires.”

  “Thanks, Doc. You sure know how to make a woman feel special.”

  Dr. Little ignored her.

  “Third, we need to keep you overnight. For observation.”

  “I’m feeling great. What’s to observe?”

  “You may or may not have a concussion.”

  “Like I said. I feel great.”

  “It’s a precaution. You were unconscious for a bit. Somewhat disoriented. I can’t let you go.”

  “I like you, too, Doc, but I’m fine. Trust me.”

  “Let your…sister…go home, get you…and maybe her…some fresh clothes, have a good rest tonight, and maybe you can leave in the morning.”

  Jacqui’s face soured in disgust. Anne forced back a grin.

  “I’m liking you even better now, Doc, but no thanks. Got things to do.”

  “Perhaps I haven’t been clear. You will not be discharged today. Period. I’ll look in again tomorrow. Then we’ll talk.” Little paused a moment in order for his words to sink in. Then he turned and left.

  “Is this a hospital or a prison?” Anne shouted after him.

  Little’s head popped back through the curtain. Anne detected an owlish grin.

  “Welcome to ‘Hotel California.’”

  53.

  From the Hilton Garden Inn where Ben had spent the evening, it had been a fifteen-minute taxi drive along the Rideau River to the new national headquarters building of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. During last night’s phone call, Sarah had told him about the gas station explosion. He would have caught the next plane home, but Sarah reassured him that it wasn’t necessary. Anne was okay. She would keep an eye on her and keep him updated.

  The new billion-dollar building rose out of the autumn landscape southwest of the capital. The glitter of glass and the silvery gleam of the great structure immediately caught one’s eye. Its grounds spread across fifty acres, most of it grassy patches, avenues, and immense parking areas.

  Ben passed through security and was escorted through an atrium and down a wide corridor to a small amphitheatre. Already seated were eighteen men and four women, some in police or military uniforms, some not; some Canadian, others foreign.

  Ben received an information packet and an individualized agenda. RCMP Commissioner Keith Whately greeted the ensemble. A fifteen-minute introductory video rolled across the screen. A half-hour guided group tour followed. After that, a small cadre of escorts sorted and gathered those with similar agendas and led them to their scheduled orientation sites. Ben’s group included a police superintendent from Nova Scotia and a chatty senior public servant from Newfoundland.

  The RCMP’s Deputy Commissioner of Specialized Policing Services met Ben’s group before their first session. He was tall, angular, and lanky. His hands seemed disproportionately large, and his piercing stare was a peculiar match with his calm, easy-going manner. Ben knew him almost at once. It was Bill Truman.

  “Ben, good to see you again. It’s been a long time,” he said, shaking hands.

  “Eighteen, nineteen years.”

  “Saw your name on the roster. It brought back a lot of memories. Ottawa…the police academy…walking a beat on Bank Street…,” said Truman, chuckling at some memory.

  “Yeah,” said Ben, “…at twenty below…”

  “…good times…”

  “They were,” said Ben, “…most of them. I never heard that you made the big leap from city police to the RCMP.”

  “Took a chance. Turned out to be the right choice for me.” A finger beckoned from down the hall, and a hand to the ear signalled a phone call. “We’ll talk later,” he said and turned.

  Ben’s two morning workshops covered updates to the Canadian Firearms Program and new courses at the Police College. After a twenty-minute break, Ben was taken to Forensic Science and Identification Services.

  For Ben, FS&IS was a jaw-dropping look at their biological, chemical, and engineering labs, testing facilities, information repositories, and computer technologies, almost entirely staffed by civilian scientists, specialists, and engineers, who analyzed and processed vast quantities of potential evidence: chemical traces, DNA, currency and banknotes, tool marks, poisons, criminal identifications, ballistics, crime-scene analysis, and so on.

  Dr. Calico Fernandez headed the Trace Evidence lab and led Ben’s small group around her world of Bunsen burners, computers, separators, and spectral analyzers. Calico was a short, tired-looking woman with mixed brown hair and sharp bony features whose enthusiasm and thoughtfulness more than compensated for her plainness. As she spoke, she could read the faces of her small group like litmus paper, and, when she sensed that her scientific terminology and depth of field had reached saturation point, she quickly put on her middle-school science teacher hat. She had had several years’ teaching experience before being recruited into the RCMP’s Laboratory Services fifteen years ago, and she replaced the glazed stares of her group with a glint or two of wonder.

  “I loved Anne of Green Gables,” said Calico, having learned where Ben hailed from. “Anne was a bit of a know-it-all, but still… In fact, I read all of Lucy Maud’s books. Have you read any?” she asked Ben.

  “’Fraid not,” he said. “I’m from Ottawa, actually.”

  “But you live and work on PEI.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You’re so lucky…so-o-o lucky. That’s where I got my undergraduate degree. UPEI. Anyway, our labs are a wonderful resource for local police agencies there. If we get a paint chip, we can identify the car’s make and model, and sometimes the year and even the manufacturing plant which turned it out.”

  “When I worked with the Charlottetown Police and referred samples for identification, we were very satisfied with the outcomes.”

  “Thank you. We got a few samples just couriered in this morning, as a matter of fact. From that explosion yesterday. You know, the one in Charlottetown. Have you heard about it?”

  “I have. A friend of mine was one of those injured.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry!” she said.

  “What will you test for?”

  “Explo
sive residue,” she said. Ben looked surprised. Then a flutter of disquiet dampened her countenance.

  “But it was an accident,” said Ben. “One car rear-ended another.”

  “Well, there you go,” she said. “We’ll chalk that test up to overzealous investigators. It sometimes happens. Now, through that door, gentlemen, is where we will find…”

  Ben scarcely heard the words. His mind was already overwhelmed with a flood of not-so-pleasant possibilities.

  54.

  Jacqui had been uncharacteristically withdrawn all afternoon. Anne thought she needed a break, and Anne herself needed a distraction from the boredom of an enforced convalescence. So she sent her to the hospital gift shop to pick up a few things. Jacqui returned half an hour later with a couple of magazines, Cosmo and Good Housekeeping, as well as a Harlequin romance novel. Anne looked at the selection sceptically and wondered if Jacqui were trying to send her some kind of message.

  After supper, Anne sent Jacqui home by cab. She skimmed through “How to Get Lucky at the Office” in Cosmo and “Taking the Horror Out of Kitchen Stains” in Good Housekeeping before she dozed off. Her cell phone roused her. It was Ben.

  “How are you feeling? What happened?” he asked.

  “It was pretty terrifying…”

  Anne elaborated on the accident, as well as her worry that Jacqui and her friend had been killed.

  “And what about you?”

  “I’m okay. Took some smoke and got a cut. They’re keeping me for observation. I get out tomorrow.”

  “Ya know, Sarah and Mary Anne were in to see you,” Ben said.

  “I guess I was asleep then.”

  A flash of colour caught her eye. Anne looked up. Her privacy curtain was open enough to see the door to her ward. She stiffened uncomfortably. She recognized the person walking through it and toward her bed.

  “Gotta go. Visitor coming in. Good luck with the big meetings tomorrow. See ya in a few days,” she said and closed her phone.

  Gwen Fowler strode toward the foot of her bed and smiled.

  “Hi,” she said. “Feeling better?”

  Anne was just as surprised at her cordial smile as she had been about her appearance in the doorway a moment before.

  “Well enough. Tired,” she said, feeling somewhat sheepish, and added, “Surprised to see you here, though. Visiting someone?”

  “Just you.”

  “I thought you would have had better things to do.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “As I recall, our phone conversation the other day was rather chilly.”

  “I was feeling more sorry for Dit than I was for you at the time.”

  “Is he still pissed off?”

  “He doesn’t take offense so easily, but you caught him off-guard. He was simply defending me.”

  “So you know how I feel?”

  “Yes.”

  “And yet you still came? Why?”

  “Well, I’m not going away. And you and Dit have some history. So we’ve got to work through this…or come to some understanding…at least for Dit’s sake, don’t you think?”

  “So, if he’s not angry with me anymore, why didn’t he come here with you?”

  “He’s in Singapore. Has been for the past two days.”

  “Singapore?”

  “Some contract negotiations with the local police force for surveillance and monitoring systems.”

  A puzzled expression swept Anne’s face.

  “So how did Eli know about my…?”

  The words dribbled away. Anne stared at Gwen. She shrugged knowingly.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Dit would have wanted me to. It’s what friends do. So, getting back to my question… Are you in love with Dit?”

  55.

  Perhaps she was still suffering residual effects. The words had just popped out her mouth as if propelled, and, when they spilled into the light, she wondered where they had come from. Nevertheless, there they were, laid bare in front of both her and Gwen.

  “I don’t know,” she had said. “I don’t know if I’m in love with Dit or not.”

  “Thanks. That’s all I needed to know,” Gwen had said. “I think now we can be friends.”

  That had doubly confused Anne. Enigma followed enigma. She no more understood Gwen’s reply than she had understood her own admission, and Gwen was no more help in the matter. She just smiled, turned, and left the ward.

  “We’ll talk later,” she said before disappearing down the corridor.

  That’s how Anne remembered it the next morning. As she awoke, it seemed like an unsettling dream, one in which you are unsure who anyone is and are still baffled by their actions and confused by their words, but not frightened. Perhaps it was a dream, Anne speculated, and half-believed it until she saw the magazine and box of candy that Gwen had left for her.

  It was mid-morning before Jacqui arrived at the hospital. She sat on the edge of Anne’s bed.

  “Overslept,” she said. She sounded apologetic.

  “You needed the rest. You’ve had a rough time of it as well.” She patted Jacqui’s leg.

  Jacqui handed her mother a copy of The Guardian.

  “We made the front page, Mom.”

  A banner headline read: “Blast Rocks City.” A two-column sub-head added: “3 Dead, 8 injured; Police Investigate.”

  “You’re looking well this morning,” said Dr. Little. He had appeared like a magician, suddenly out of nowhere, it seemed. He startled Jacqui, who was still absorbed in the news article.

  “Do you mean ‘captivating’ or ‘captive’?” asked Anne.

  “Let’s take a look, shall we?” Little examined her chart. “Okay…okay…okay…,” he said mentally ticking off high points of her overnight observation.

  “I take it everything’s okay. Can I go now?”

  “Do you remember how you got here?”

  “By ambulance from the gas station.”

  “Who brought you this magazine?” he said picking one off the food tray.

  “Gwen Fowler.”

  “What’s my name?”

  “I’m sorry, doctor. I must still be a little forgetful. Do lucky guesses count?”

  “Who won the Stanley Cup last year?”

  “The Maple Leafs.”

  “Forgetful…and delusional,” he mumbled, as he pretended to write on her chart.

  “My doctor, the vaudevillian,” said Anne to Jacqui.

  “Okay, pack up, Ms. Brown. We’ve got really sick people waiting for that bed.”

  “Next time I get blown up, I’ll book into a Holiday Inn. Better room service,” said Anne with a grin.

  “By the way, there are some people here to see you. I’ll ask the nurse to show them in once you’ve dressed. Good luck.”

  “Break a leg, P.T.,” she said with a wink.

  Anne hustled into the clothes that Jacqui had brought from the house. She wanted to out-distance her nurse, whom she knew would be obliged to trundle her to the exit in the obligatory wheelchair but, in her rush to leave, she had quite forgotten about the visitors who were waiting to call on her. They greeted her just outside the door to her ward.

  “Ms. Brown, we’d like a few minutes of your time if you’re feeling up to it.”

  Anne nodded. They wore no uniform, and their dress was casual-sloppy, but Anne knew they were police officers, detectives with the city police. They led her and Jacqui toward a small empty visitor waiting room just past the nurse’s station and closed the door behind them.

  They needed her account of the mishap, and Anne led the detectives through events leading up to the explosion, where she was, where the girls were, and what she remembered about the aftermath.

  “Is there a Mr. Brown?” asked one det
ective.

  “I’m a widow.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “No time for one.”

  “Employed?”

  “Self-employed. I run Darby Investigations and Security.”

  “You must have ruffled some feathers there once in a while…unhappy clients, husbands caught with their pants down, cashiers with hands in the till. Anybody come to mind?”

  “I don’t quite see what my background has to do with a motor vehicle accident…even a very tragic one like this.”

  “We don’t believe that it was an accident.”

  “Suicide? That’s a helluva way to get even. Besides, I never heard of the people who rear-ended me. The Arsenaults. And I haven’t had any clients up west. Doesn’t make sense.”

  “The rear-end collision, we believe, was accidental, but we think it triggered an explosion in your vehicle.”

  “I don’t see how that’s possible. Couldn’t the other car have hit a fuel pump before hitting my car?”

  “It not only could, but it did. Nevertheless, video surveillance recovered from the gas station’s camera suggests it, and we have reports from eye witnesses and additional video footage from the hotel parking area across the street that confirms it. The Arsenaults’ vehicle vaulted a curb into the gas station. It nicked a pump and struck the left rear panel of your car. Your vehicle exploded, and that explosion set off the spilled fuel from the gas pump. You had just filled the tank. Full tanks burn if they’re ruptured. They don’t explode on contact. There was a fireball, but that was after the fact. The sequence looks suspicious to us and to the Fire Marshal who reviewed it.”