Erasing Memory

by Scott Thornley

  He realized what it was well before he reached it—the Schubert jacket. He picked it up by the edges, blew off the grit and turned towards the yellow slice of light coming from the cottage. When he got there, he squeezed his palms together and peered inside the elliptical opening, expecting to find it empty, but there was something inside: a neat white rectangle with a deckled edge. He flipped the jacket over and tilted it so that the paper slid closer to the opening. A photograph.

  A smiling brunette, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. He took out the photo and held it up to the light. The girl in the image—the woman who now lay dead in the cottage—was sitting on a beach recliner in a one-piece; another recliner was off to the side with a towel and beach bag beside it. Two pairs of flip-flops lay between them. On the back of the photo there was handwriting in pencil, too faint to make out in the dim light. He turned it over again to look at the girl.

  She had the figure for a bikini but she was wearing a one-piece, modest by the standards of a decade or so ago, when, he assumed, the photo had been taken. Her legs, firm and tanned, were closed—not forced together by modesty or shame, just gently together. He had a photograph of someone he loved in that same pose—all smiles and sunshine—it was somewhere in the mess of his desk drawer. That drawer was a stark contrast to the cottage above, so neat that even a corpse couldn’t mess it up.

  The place had been built with money but in haste, as if more attention had been given to the idea of a beach house than to building it well. It looked as if it had never been lived in. The nearest neighbours were out of sight, a hundred yards in either direction. They’d be interviewed, as would the person trolling around in the outboard, but MacNeice guessed that no one would know the people who owned this cottage.

  He made his way up the stairs to the balcony and, preferring to avoid the swarm inside, walked around to the breezeway and into the garage. Through the window he could see that Williams had assumed a position at the bar where he pretended to ignore the forensics team. Swetsky, catching sight of MacNeice, came out the side door to meet him. “He’s sulking.”

  “I can see that.” MacNeice was holding the album and the snapshot the way choirboys do their hymnals.

  “Whaddya got?”

  “Schubert. A piano trio. It was on when you arrived.” MacNeice held the jacket up so Swetsky could read the title, careful to tuck the snapshot behind it.

  “You don’t say.”

  “Swets, do me a favour—get that key from the purse and bring it out here for a minute.”

  “Sure, but why not get it yourself?”

  “I need to get some things out of the car. While you’re in there, push the button to open the garage door, okay?” As Swetsky went inside, happy to have a mission, MacNeice propped the Schubert jacket against the wall of the cottage, wedging it so it wouldn’t fall, then slipped the snapshot into his jacket pocket.

  As he cleared the breezeway, MacNeice could see that the small turning circle among the pines was now lined with vehicles, including the pathologist’s black Suburban. Palmer was sitting in the passenger seat of one of the Chevys, talking on his cellphone. He glanced vacantly up as MacNeice went by, then turned his head away to continue the conversation. From the look of it, he was getting into something hot and heavy. He had a reputation with women—often somebody else’s. Maybe another cop’s wife or, like the last time, a firefighter’s. That one had ended with his Indian motorcycle—the real love of his life—going up in flames at 4 a.m. outside his apartment. When the pumper truck arrived, the first firefighter out of the truck was the woman’s husband. No charges were ever laid, and Palmer was still paying off the bike.

  From a weathered black Samsonite case in the trunk of his car, MacNeice removed a Sony digital camera, one of those little black jobs that clock in at ten megapixels and can capture almost as much as the Nikon SLR the crime-scene boy was currently clacking away with inside. MacNeice closed the lid and laid the photo on top of it. He took several shots, zooming in for detail, and then turned it over to take several more of the back, making sure the flash wasn’t bleaching out the writing.

  The garage door opened so smoothly and quietly behind him that it was only the sudden wash of light that gave it away. Swetsky appeared, latex gloves on, purse in hand. MacNeice stifled a grin.

  “There were prints and partials on the clasp, lipstick, key and fob,” Swetsky said. “No idea yet what killed her.”

  “Poison, or something worse. As for the cottage, it was cleaned before we got here.”

  “Why do you figure poison?”

  “Something about the way she smelled—up close, I mean.”

  As Swetsky handed over the purse, MacNeice passed him the snapshot. With a wry smile, Swetsky said, “I knew you had something else, dammit. I knew it.” He stared at the photo for a long moment, losing the smile. “Shit, she really was a beauty.”

  MacNeice took a tin of putty out of his case. Taking the key, he pressed it into the putty. “These types of keys are registered. We might as well find out to whom before the Tyvek boys do. The company’s Lock Tight.” Swetsky watched him remove the key and put the tin back in the case, next to a bar of seventy percent dark chocolate. As MacNeice was photographing both sides of the key and fob, Swetsky noticed Palmer, still on the phone, and shook his head slightly.

  “Strictly speaking, Mac, this isn’t kosher.” Swetsky wasn’t referring to Palmer.

  MacNeice put the key back into the purse. “Neither are you. Neither am I. You are a second-generation polack and I’m a Glaswegian thrice removed … not that we couldn’t be all that and kosher too, mind you.”

  “Thrice. Christ, that’s nice.”

  MacNeice took back the photo, dropped the purse into Swetsky’s hand and said, “I’ll grab the Schubert jacket from the breezeway—the snapshot was inside it. We’ll give them both to the nerds.”

  Walking through the garage to the breezeway door, MacNeice couldn’t take his eyes off the snapshot. The play of light seemed to animate it somehow. He wasn’t listening when Swetsky said, “Did ya notice? No oil stains, no tire-tread marks, no nothing. We’re walking on virgin concrete here.”

  Turning the photo over, MacNeice finally registered what it said: Lydia and Margaux. Friends Forever. 7.00

  “Am I talking to myself here?” Swetsky said.

  MacNeice glanced at him standing under the twin fluorescents, the tiny clutch bag at his side. “Don’t get used to carrying that thing around, Swets.” He slid the snapshot back into the sleeve, then handed them to Swetsky and said, “Would you hand this stuff over? I’ll put where I found it in my report, but I’ve seen the beach and now I’m going home.”

  Swetsky nodded, and as he turned towards the breezeway door, stopped to say, “Mac, how’d you get here? Or better still, why’d you get here? You’re not on shift, and this isn’t your usual territory.”

  “I was coming back from the cemetery when the call came over the radio.” He hesitated. “I’m going to request the lead on this, Swets, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Sure, no problem. But d’ya mind telling me why?”

  “Let’s just say I have a soft spot for violinists. I’ll call it in to Wallace on my way back to the city.”

  Swetsky nodded again. “I’ll get Palmer and Williams to talk to the neighbours and I’ll check the ownership on this place. We’ll walk copies of this snapshot around too.”

  MacNeice had stopped listening again, so Swetsky headed back through the door to the cottage.

  AT HIS CAR, MACNEICE pulled the keys out of his pocket, happy that he’d parked close to the road and wasn’t blocked in. He glanced back once at the cottage, and through the open front door he could see four Tyvek-covered nerds—three men and a woman—working closely around the body. They were quiet and thorough, using gadgets only they knew the purpose of.

  So there it was, he thought: the dream cottage on the lake all lit up with more people in it than likely it had ever seen, and he thought of t
he young violinist in the chiffon gown who had become the centre of attention. Unlocking the car, he glanced at Palmer still sitting there on his cell, talking the talk to someone who’d regret it later. Wearily he opened the car door and sank behind the wheel.

  He picked up the CD wallet from the passenger seat, flipping through the sleeves until he found one of Kate’s favourites—Ascenseur pour l’échafaud—a soundtrack by Miles Davis for an old French film. When she’d brought it home, he’d pointed out her resemblance to the blonde in the liner notes. “Look, it’s a very sexy picture of someone who looks like you, with Miles.” And she’d smiled a smile that took several minutes to wear off.

  He turned on the ignition, then slipped Miles into the dashboard player. He tucked cummings into the glove box beside his holstered weapon, removed the camera from his pocket and tossed it onto the passenger seat, then buckled himself in and listened for a moment to the low, comforting rumble of the car until the deep opening bass notes of the CD took over, Miles’s horn mellow in the early morning.

  The digital clock on the dash read 5:31 a.m. and the sun was minutes away from its big ta-dah of the day. MacNeice ached with fatigue, and something deeper. He eased his old Chevy out of the circular drive and over the grated ditch that ran alongside the road to keep the cottages from sliding into the lake when the November rains came. The chassis groaned as the wheels took on the uneven surface. Three times he’d been offered one of the new fleet cars and had declined. “As long as there’s a mechanic willing to keep her going, I’ll stick with her.” There was a willing mechanic, though the man suspected, rightly, that MacNeice’s loyalty to his ride was all about the CD player and the superior sound system that had been installed in a factory error.

  MacNeice drove south on the road that skirted the lake for a few miles, the distant ridge of maple and pine backlit by the deep purple of pre-dawn. Accelerating onto the four-lane highway, he appreciated the way the slow, languorous rhythm of the CD seemed in synch with the pale yellow sodium lamps flashing over the hood. He glanced over at the camera and suddenly regretted not taking photographs of the dead girl. Then he thought how strange it was that she’d become a girl to him, no longer the woman he had first encountered. The effect of staring at the snapshot, no doubt.

  There would be no shortage of clinical photos, of course, but he would have attempted to capture her beauty. He was convinced that insights would come as much from those images as from the other. And if images needed to be shown to the family—but then again, maybe that was just him.

  Soon he was approaching the cut-off to Greater Dundurn—if he took the exit to the right he could come into town along a treed Victorian promenade with a manicured park on one side and a 2,700-acre nature reserve on the other, conceived and built by a people certain of an industrial future that promised prosperity for all and forever. While the golden era of heavy industry had passed, the trees, plantings, stone crown-adorned abutments and ornate balustrades of the bridges high above the bay were still elegant symbols of a long-forgotten optimism.

  He chose the other way, powering the Chevy towards the great soaring bridge that separated the lake from Dundurn Bay. Built in the late 1950s, the Sky-High Bridge allowed both access to the inner harbour for what had been an endless parade of lake freighters and uninterrupted flow of traffic to and from New York and Ohio to the city of Toronto. To MacNeice, taking the bridge was simply the best way to get a view of everything.

  Though he’d lived here all his life, it was still a thrill to see the sun rising over the lake and shining across to the old steel mills and factories that lined the bay. Most visitors thought Dundurn was ugly. MacNeice could never understand that. The harbour was inspiring to him—even the smokestacks, the towering cranes and the enormous rust-coloured, dust-covered buildings with long piers that clawed like fingers into the bay towards the few freighters that still eased their way in and out.

  THREE

  —

  THE CITY, LIKE ALL CITIES, measured its prosperity geographically. With Dundurn, the best measure was how far you lived from the plants that provided its robust economy. The north end—closest to the factories and the bay—was the poorest and toughest, its houses forever coated in red dust. Depending on the prevailing wind, residents rarely knew anything but the smell of sulphur in the air. The sweet spot in Dundurn was still the west end, farthest away from the prevailing breezes of the steel plants. And the sweetest spot of all was close to the escarpment that ran the length of the city, referred to by everyone as “the mountain.”

  The city’s crime played out the same way. The white-collar stuff was almost exclusively a west-end affair. In the north end, violence was frequent and always visceral. As Swetsky, who had grown up in the north end, put it, “If your everyday vocabulary includes the words blast furnace, you can expect some spillover in the kitchen at night.” When MacNeice was walking a beat there as a new recruit, people would joke that the local rats were bigger than the local cats, and more numerous. His sergeant told him that in the old Mafia days of the 1920s and 1930s, bodies wearing cement overshoes were dumped in the bay by the dozens. They were probably still there.

  Slowing, MacNeice moved to the inside lane of the bridge, lowered the volume on the music and switched on his two-way. Within two connections he was speaking to Betty Fernihough, the head of the precinct’s IT unit. After a brief exchange of pleasantries—Betty liked it that way, as did he—he asked, “Have you found out who owns the cottage?”

  “Yes, I gave the name to Swetsky about ten minutes ago. A Dr. Michael Hadley—he has a dental clinic in the west end. We think he may keep the beach house as a rental property.”

  “Swets hit you early, Betty. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Mac, I’m an early riser anyway. I was in at five thirty this morning.”

  “Can you do me a favour, then? Look and see if you can find any images of young women just graduating or beginning their careers as violinists. First name Lydia. She was probably in her mid-twenties.”

  “Christ, Mac, how the hell did you come up with that?”

  “Just a hunch. Look at the university, the Conservatory of Music, chamber music societies, orchestras and soloists between here and Toronto. You’ll know this girl when you see her—tall, brunette, beautiful, and blessed—or cursed—with an optimistic smile.”

  “Whatever the hell that is,” Betty said distractedly. If it weren’t for the road noise and the faint bluesy Miles, he was certain he’d be able to hear her already clicking away on her keyboard. “Get some sleep, Mac—you’re sounding borderline crispy. Swets told me how come you got there first.”

  MACNEICE EASED THE CHEVY off the highway onto Mountain Road South, cranking down both driver and passenger windows to breathe in the early morning air. The sun was streaking through the houses and trees on his left, flickering through the car. The stripes on the road unfolded; the streetlights had gone out, but he couldn’t remember when. He wound the fingers of his left hand through his hair—it was long for him, and showing signs of grey.

  As the wind blew the strands out of his grasp, he realized he was falling asleep. “Two hands,” he told himself sternly, shoving his butt into the back of the seat and pulling himself erect. He glanced down at the Sony. “I would love to have seen you play.”

  The sun was already warming up the hill below the escarpment where the hundreds of happy-looking houses of Pleasant Park defined the eastern end of the city. Beyond it lay the town of Secord, as quiet and bucolic as ever. PP, as it’s known over the two-way, had been finished three years earlier, and from a distance it admittedly looked lovely spread along the hillside. The development had been the subject of a community brawl between those who wanted the hill to remain a place of quiet beauty, of songbird, deer and fox—MacNeice’s perspective—and those who saw it as the best opportunity to expand the city and “take the pressure off the inner core.” He knew little about the design of successful cities but had assumed that compression was on
e aspect that made them work. In his travels with Kate to France and Italy, he’d never once felt that the narrow streets, or the shops, apartments and houses that had been built around and above them, lacked for anything, least of all space.

  MacNeice made a hard right up the long, winding lane towards the Cedarway Estate, which had sat for almost a century on a vast property that crested the escarpment. Easing to a stop in the gravel drive of the Gatehouse, the Edwardian folly a hundred feet below the top that he called home, he put the car in park and turned off the ignition. Electronic rolling fences and video security systems had long ago made the gatehouse redundant to the estate above, which suited MacNeice just fine.

  As a young patrolman he had arrested the gateman several times for drunk driving. Coming here each time to inform the man’s wife, he had grown to admire the solidity of the building. When the gateman and his wife retired and moved into town, the owner carved the building and the quarter-acre stand of pine and cedar that adjoined it from the main estate and put it on the market. MacNeice and Kate had put up everything they’d saved to make the down payment. The owner likely remembered his name, or his father’s, from the MacNeice Marina on Raven Lake, where as a kid Mac had pumped gas into the tank of the man’s sleek twelve-cylinder mahogany motor launch. Or perhaps he had a soft spot for young cops or violinists, because the estate agent told MacNeice and Kate that theirs wasn’t even close to the highest bid—it was just the one he accepted. They took that as a good omen for their lives, and for the most part it had been.

  Leaving his keys on the table inside the door, MacNeice went to the living room to set the Sony camera next to his computer. He looked out the large window at the trees. Its mullions broke the scene into a soft grey grid—good for a moment like this.