The door opened again. A man in his early fifties came in. He was tall and had the build of an ageing football player. His suit was gray, his tie an indifferent collection of stripes. And he was holding a steaming plastic cup.
‘Ms Howard? Sergeant William Clark of the RCMP. Here’s your coffee.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, accepting it.
‘I’m not planning to detain you here, as long as the matter at hand can be resolved quickly . . . which, in turn, will depend on the answers you give me.’
‘I’ll help you in any way I can, sir.’
He studied me as I said that, gauging my sincerity, then nodded his approval. During the drive over to what I now knew was a federal police building, I had made the decision to come clean with the cops. I would talk to them directly. I would not make excuses. I would tell them an approximation of the truth – because, after all, what is the actual truth in any situation like this? Sipping my weak black coffee – and ruminating again on the thought that a policeman actually offered it to me – I decided: They’ve had a complaint from His Holiness and they’ve had to investigate it. If I tell them what they want to know – as the Sergeant informed me – they might just be done with me in an hour or two.
He asked me to confirm my full name, my address, my date of birth, my place of birth . . .
‘So you’re American?’ he asked. I explained the Canadian passport – and how long I had been resident in the country. I sensed he knew all this already, but wanted to see how I would respond to his questions.
‘This is not a formal interview,’ he said. ‘You’re not under arrest. But we need to know why you were impersonating a newspaper reporter to gain access to individuals associated with the Ivy MacIntyre case.’
‘Because I became obsessed with it.’
‘And why did you become so obsessed with it?’
‘Because I lost my only child in January last year.’
I articulated that sentence flatly, without emotion. Sergeant Clark looked down into a folder open on the table. I glanced over and saw there were clippings about Emily’s death on the top of the pile. He too had used Google to find out about me.
‘In the wake of your daughter’s death, did you suffer from any psychological breakdown?’
‘I’m sure you have all that in the file,’ I replied.
He said nothing, but again looked down at his papers. Had he run a check on me already and found out that my accident was on a national police database down South? No doubt about it. No doubt at all.
‘Now, I am given to understand that you hold a doctorate from Harvard and a very responsible job at the Central Public Library here in Calgary. I only spoke a few minutes ago with your boss, Mrs Woods.’
‘Did you tell her why I was being held by the police?’
‘Yes, I did – even though, I need to reiterate, you are not being held by us.’
That’s the end of my job then.
‘I did explain to Mrs Woods that what you had done wasn’t criminal, but could become so were you to repeat such behavior again.’
‘I won’t repeat it.’
‘I’m glad to hear that. Speaking directly, the Public Prosecutor could – were we to approach him – make a case against you for impersonation, for perverting the course of justice and for wasting police time. We’ve expended a good half-day on all this; time that could be better used trying to track down the individual or individuals responsible for Ivy MacIntyre’s disappearance.’
I hung my head, feeling nothing but shame.
‘Given that, I do recognize there are extenuating circumstances here. You should know that Mrs Woods robustly defended you – and said that, under the circumstances, you were coping well with the psychological damage that, I know, accompanies the loss of a child.
‘That said, you did “interview” Rev. Coursen under false pretenses – and the Vancouver Sun is also most displeased with having been falsely represented by you. So I need to first ask you this, Ms Howard: What did you hope to get out of your “interviews” with Rev. Coursen and Dwane Poole and everyone else you spoke to in Townsend?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe I was thinking, if I could solve the case . . .’
‘You’d somehow bring your daughter back to life?’
‘I never thought that. I just became a little too focused on the details of Ivy’s disappearance – and kept wondering if there might be another side to the story. It was, I see now, a displacement activity. So I want to apologize to you, Sergeant, for any time I’ve wasted. Just as I plan to write Rev. Coursen to say just how sorry I am.’
‘Let me ask you this, Ms Howard – do you yourself have any thoughts about the case?’
Careful here. If you enthusiastically begin to talk about how he should really check out all the talk about Brenda’s violent streak, he’ll probably decide you’re still very much obsessed with it all.
Then again, if you say nothing . . .
‘One thing did stick with me. Dwane Poole stated that George MacIntyre informed him that his injuries requiring hospital treatment didn’t happen in a bar brawl, but were the direct cause of an attack by his wife, Brenda.’
‘We got the same information from MacIntyre himself. And, of course, we investigated it. It’s his word against hers – and the medical records at the hospital show that he reported his injuries as received in a bar fight.’
‘Did he also talk about how Brenda was violent towards Ivy?’
‘Again it’s a “he said, she said” situation. Police work is never infallible, but we wouldn’t have charged him with Ivy’s disappearance unless we were certain we had a case against him . . . which we do. I mention all this because, I sense, that you still have your doubts about his guilt. Which, as a member of the public, you are entitled to have – as long as those doubts do not interfere with an ongoing investigation. Do you understand what I am saying here, Ms Howard?’
‘You have my assurances I will stay out of all this in the future.’
‘I accept those assurances. And given the circumstances of your case, I want to be humane about all this. But do understand: if you make further contact with any of the people associated with this case – or if, for that matter, you’re seen snooping around Townsend again – you will be prosecuted. I hope it doesn’t have to come to all that.’
I was allowed to leave half an hour later – a uniformed officer actually giving me a lift back to my apartment. When I returned there was a message on my cellphone from Geraldine Woods, asking me to phone her. I did as instructed. She was pleasant yet direct on the phone.
‘Now whatever about the police phoning me up and reporting your interference into an ongoing criminal investigation, there is the fact that you lied to me about the reason for your absence from work this week. Would you like to explain this to me, please?’
I rolled out the same apologies I had given the Sergeant – and again pleaded emotional distress.
She heard me out and said: ‘I’m willing to let this ride the one time – out of actual respect for you and the fact that you’re doing such a brilliant job for us. So please don’t make me fire you, Jane. And please report back to work on Monday without fail.’
After this conversation I did the one thing I could do under the circumstances: I crawled beneath the covers of my bed and passed out until around midnight. When I awoke I felt that momentary rejuvenation that comes with having slept for twelve hours without interruption, followed by the usual nightmarish déjà vu that I had now accepted as a facet of every morning. But as I showered and made coffee and listened to the all-night concert on CBC Radio 2, another thought came to me: Say there was a similar instance of three girls disappearing from another small town in Canada?
Before I knew it I was dressed and back at the all-night internet café. The guy behind the counter grumbled a ‘Hello’ as I came in – no doubt categorizing me as another of his weirdo night-time clients. I bought a bad instant coffee, slid in front of a monitor
and went to work.
Eight hours later, I’d come up with very little. Kids went missing all the time in Canada. The web was full of page after page of desperate postings by parents with details about their vanished children. But most of these were runaways and, with a couple of gruesome exceptions, the adolescents were usually traced to down-at-heel squats in the grimmer corners of every major city in the country.
One item did interest me: the story of an eleven-year-old girl who went missing near Hamilton, Ontario and was then found ten days later deposited on her parents’ doorstep, babbling about having been abducted and sexually molested. The article from the Hamilton Daily Record spoke about ‘police investigations’ into her disappearance and accusations, and then, in a later article, about how a ‘trusted family counselor’ had been investigated by the local constabulary. No charges, however, were brought against him. The girl, meanwhile, had been admitted to a psychiatric facility, suffering from post-traumatic stress.
At least they got her back, I thought as I printed the article and added it to my burgeoning file of Ivy MacIntyre-related clippings.
As I was paying off the charges for eight hours of internet use – a bargain at twelve bucks – my cellphone rang. Much to my surprise I found myself talking to Vern. He sounded hesitant and tense.
‘Thought I should check in, see how things were going,’ he said.
‘Did you hear what happened?’
‘You mean, about the . . . uhm . . . police?’
‘The RCMP, to be specific about it.’
‘Yeah, I heard.’
‘Marlene Tucker, no doubt, heard it from Geraldine Woods who passed it on to . . .’
A nervous cough from Vern.
‘Well, you know how small things can get talked about around here,’ he said. ‘You got time for a cup of coffee this morning?’
‘Something on your mind, Vern?’
‘No . . . just . . . uhm . . . like to see you, if it’s not too early or anything like that.
‘I’ve been up for hours. You know Caffé Beano?’
We agreed to meet there in half an hour.
Though Calgary wasn’t exactly New York when it came to style, Caffé Beano still had a clientele who dressed as if this was SoHo. So when Vern showed up – in his chocolate-brown anorak and his matching chocolate-brown flat corduroy cap and his gray polyester trousers – eyes did turn towards him, and I suddenly regretted arranging our rendezvous here, because I could also sense his unease at being so out of place amidst the black leather jackets and designer shades, and the fifteen varieties of java on sale.
He sat down nervously at my table.
‘They serve just regular black coffee here?’ he said.
‘They sure do,’ I said. After sorting him out with a mug I sat down opposite him.
‘So . . .’ I said.
‘So . . .’ he said.
‘That was quite a drinking session last Sunday.’
‘That’s one of the reasons I’m here. I felt pretty damn awful about getting so smashed in front of you.’
‘I wasn’t exactly being abstemious either,’ I said.
‘I know, but . . . I hate when I do that.’
‘Then don’t do it.’
‘I need to do it from time to time.’
‘Then don’t feel bad about it. I didn’t.’
‘You sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘This week, when I found out about your . . . uhm . . . problems with the . . . uhm . . . law, I couldn’t help but think . . . uhm . . . maybe if I hadn’t gotten you into that marathon drinking session . . .’
‘You mean, because I saw George MacIntyre on the TV in the bar?’
‘That’s right.’
‘You’re blaming yourself for that?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Jesus . . . and I thought I was the Guilt Queen here.’
‘Are you OK now?’
‘I wasn’t not OK before. I just got this thing into my head that the police were holding the wrong man.’
‘Were they?’
‘You want to know?’
‘Of course.’
‘Really?’
‘I said that, yes.’
Before pausing for breath I started talking. I must have talked straight through without stopping for the next forty-five minutes. I couldn’t shut myself up. As I worked my way through the entire Ivy MacIntyre case – raising the questions I had about who exactly was guilty here and whether there had been a terrible miscarriage of justice–Ikept digging and digging into my file of papers on the case. It was only much later that day – when I recalled this monologue and my cross-examination-style presentation of the case for and against George MacIntyre – that I shuddered at the thought of how damn unhinged I sounded . . . and how Vern just sat there, looking a little stunned at my soliloquy, conscious of the stares I was receiving from other café patrons who were just a little appalled to hear this woman defend what the vast majority of the public considered the indefensible . . . but which, according to the rules of Canadian politeness, they weren’t going to contradict out loud. (Tattooed bartenders operated according to a different set of rules than the latte drinkers at Caffé Beano.)
When I finally finished Vern just sat there, appearing simultaneously shell-shocked and too embarrassed to admit that he felt shell-shocked.
‘Well, come on, Vern,’ I said, still on a manic high from my Perry Mason monologue. ‘Tell me I’m full of shit, or talking out of my ass, or just . . .’
‘Jane, please,’ he hissed, quickly tapping my hand. ‘There’s no need to . . .’
‘What?’ I said, my voice still raised. ‘Articulate the thing no one wants to admit? . . . That they’ve tried and convicted a man without fully weighing all the other evidence?’
Silence. Vern glanced around and could see all the eyes in the café on us.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. Then, thanking me for the coffee, he left.
But I followed him right out onto the street.
‘Have I said the wrong thing?’ I asked him as he was trying to get into his car. ‘Did I embarrass you in there?’
He shut his car door and turned back towards me.
‘I’m going to tell you what my AA sponsor told me when I was coming off a binge. You can continue to convince yourself this sort of behavior is normal and skid off the edge of the cliff. Or you can stop it and save yourself.’
It was the first time I ever heard Vern become stern with me – and it was clear that he was uncomfortable with such paternal directness. Especially as my reaction was shameful.
‘The difference between us, Vern, is that I’m not a drunk.’
Having landed that one on him, I turned and went upstairs to my apartment and collapsed into my armchair and thought to myself: You are a drunk. Only what’s intoxicating you all the time isn’t booze, but anger. The sort of anger brought about by grief. The sort of anger which refuses to resolve itself and finds displacement in . . .
But this bout of self-recrimination was superseded by another thought: the newspapers! So I was back down at the magazine shop around the corner from Caffé Beano, buying the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Calgary Herald, the Edmonton Telegraph . . . every Canadian paper they sold there, including the Vancouver Sun.
‘You really want all of these?’ the guy asked me as he rang them up.
‘Any problem with that?’ I asked.
‘It’s your money,’ he said.
Back at the apartment, I tore through them all, hoping that somewhere I’d find an article raising a shadow of doubt on the guilt of George MacIntyre. But everyone was adhering to the law and just reporting the basic facts of the case. While flipping through the Globe and Mail I noticed a column – about an incest trial in Thunder Bay – by Charlotte Plainfield. She was a star journalist, well known in Canada as someone who frequently took up cases of child abuse and malfeasant criminal behavior. Without stopping to think I clipped out Plainfield�
��s article, grabbed my MacIntyre case file and hot-tailed it back to the internet café.
‘You again?’ grunted the clerk before handing me a password to one of the terminals. There, over the next two hours, I composed a very lengthy letter to Plainfield in defense of George MacIntyre, citing the interviews and research I had done, together with the doubts raised by the conflicting testimony, urging her to find that prostitute in Regina who had retracted the charges against him, and to generally re-examine the case. Fortunately the Globe and Mail listed her email address at the bottom of her article, so I didn’t have to search the net for it. And when I hit the print button to make a copy of my email for my files I saw that I had written over ten pages.
On Monday I returned to work. The first order of business was to pay a visit to Geraldine Woods and again apologize in person. But when I came into her office I could see that something was terribly wrong . . . or, more to the point, that I was in serious trouble.
‘I’m glad you came to see me straight away, Jane,’ she said, ‘because I was planning to ask you to come by here as soon as you arrived.’
‘What’s happened?’ I asked.
‘You mean, you don’t know what’s happened? You’re so out of touch with your actions that you didn’t realize that by sending that very long and frankly unstable email to Charlotte Plainfield . . .’
Idiot, idiot, idiot.
‘If I could try and explain . . .’ I started to say.
She raised up her hand.
‘That won’t be necessary – as a decision has already been taken about this matter.’
‘But surely before firing me, you can, at least, let me defend—’
‘We’re not firing you, Jane. We’re putting you on Health Leave. Three months’ fully paid Health Leave, to be exact . . . and if, during that time, you agree to see a state psychiatrist and agree to the course of treatment he or she recommends, you will be welcomed back here once you have been given the all-clear.’
‘And if I don’t agree?’
‘Please don’t go down that road, Jane. We do like you here. We all know what you have gone through, what you still have to deal with every day. There are people here who are actually pulling for you. I wish you’d see that.’
Leaving the World Page 48