The Night Bell

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  Many times both girls had walked in this forest with school groups and gathered pine cones or identified birds. Now they took the edgemost path – worn by generations of walkers, “back to the tribes that once wandered freely over all of this land.” The lessons had been drilled into them.

  There were newer legends. Gloria led Hazel to the Passion Pit on the side away from town. The Pit was a depression where people burned bonfires and drank bottles of Labatt’s 50 and Carling Black Label. It was hidden by the trees, although everyone knew where it was. There, Gloria lay down on her back on one of the flat slabs of granite that lined the bottom, surrounded by vines and lichen. She knew how to lie elegantly, with one knee bent. Boys had been looking at them ever since they were eleven, but now they were really looking, although neither girl was sure if they wanted to look back yet. “What did Andrew say to Ray Greene?” Hazel asked.

  “Something about a sweater you wore last week. Don’t think too much about it. Men are either dogs or brutes and most of the time you don’t know until it’s too late.” She laughed: Hee hee hee!

  “You sound like a demented monkey,” Hazel said.

  They fell to a companionable silence. Hazel had been considering whether to go to the Hallowe’en dance. She hadn’t brought it up with Gloria because dressing up in costume was far below Gloria’s station, supposedly. She wondered if Andrew Pedersen would go. He was in grade twelve, but he talked to her. Not shy, but not very forward either. He was planning on studying law at the University of Toronto. She was going to go to teachers’ college. Probably in Barrie. She was imagining her features together with Andrew’s when she heard a crack from above the Pit. Footsteps. She sat up and Gloria raised her head.

  “Smells nice down there,” came a voice. Gloria pinched the cigarette out. A girl was coming through the cover toward the rim. “You got another one of those?”

  It was Carol Lim.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Gloria.

  Carol came down anyway and waved at Hazel. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “Well?” she said to Gloria. “Do you have another one? I mean, if I stole the whole pack I’d give one away.”

  “Well, you didn’t steal this pack, did you?”

  Gloria’s audacity was breathtaking. Carol said, “At least I’m old enough to smoke.”

  “You’re old enough to wear a muumuu,” said Gloria.

  “You’re drunk!” Carol Lim thrust out her hand for the flask. “Gimme.”

  Gloria tossed her the cigarettes instead. “Empty. Too bad for you. Go back to the old folks’ home.”

  “You’re not that much younger than me, Whitman.” Carol’s long, pale face was momentarily obscured by smoke. She shook out the match. “But I’m a lot more experienced.” She was in grade thirteen in Port Dundas’s only Catholic school. She took a theatrical drag on the cigarette and exhaled perfect smoke rings.

  Gloria smiled at her. “You’re bad,” she said. “Give me my pack.”

  “Go steal another one,” said Carol Lim. “You two got boyfriends?”

  “Not as many as you do, I’m sure,” Gloria said. This time her laugh came out more like a snigger.

  “You done it?”

  “Sure,” said Gloria.

  “None of your business,” said Hazel.

  “Virgins, huh?”

  “Believe what you want,” said Gloria. “Better not get pregnant.”

  “I bet your father would have something for that.”

  This made Gloria Whitman spring to her feet. “Whaddya mean?”

  “Never mind.”

  “You better get out of here!” Gloria stepped toward her, bristling. “You people are lucky he has time for you.”

  “Us people? I was born here. In fact, I got here before you did!”

  Gloria shoved Carol hard enough to make her stumble back a couple of paces. A pendant on a silver lace swung out from her neckline. “I hope you know karate.”

  “Karate’s Japanese, round-eye.” They stared at each other. Carol shrugged her clothing straight and tucked the pendant – a heart with a rabbit emblem – back into her shirt. She took a final drag on the cigarette and flicked the glowing red butt at Gloria. “I’ll leave you lesbians alone,” she said.

  She went back up the side of the pit and continued out of sight.

  Hazel snuffed out the cigarette with her shoe. “What was that about?”

  “Yeah. She’s royalty, ain’t she? She’ll be begging my father for rubbers before long.”

  “I mean, she didn’t seem to mind you’d stolen something from her father.”

  “She’s a queer one, Carol. Hates her parents. Know why she wears a rabbit around her neck? Because she’s gonna breed like one.” She laughed again, but it wasn’t a titter, it was a low, mean sound. Hazel didn’t like this side of Gloria, this cruel, cutting side. She’d say anything. Everyone knew the Lims and everyone liked them. She changed the subject to something she knew Gloria would be happy to talk about. “So … have you really? You know, done it?”

  “Don’t be crazy. I don’t want some sweaty pig slobbering all over me.”

  “Not yet,” said Hazel, and they both said “ugh.”

  They left the little depression in the woods and began walking back, heading north into the trees on the town-side of Kilmartin Bluff Park, and the light there drifted down, almost material, and lay on the forest floor like scraps of coloured paper. Hazel got on her bike. She smelled her own breath. It was possible there was still brandy on it. She’d kept a piece of Gloria’s gum, and she popped it into her mouth. She rode slowly over the Kilmartin Bridge and felt the air flow over her face. She went up Main Street to McConnell, where she turned left and rode down to Chamber Street. Their house was number 39. When she got home, her little brother was waiting for her.

  ] 2 [

  Tuesday, October 16, 2007. Lunchtime.

  “A viatical settlement is a wonderful new option for a late-life infusion of capital! At a time when so many of Canada’s elderly are struggling on reduced pensions and investments that no longer earn double-digit returns, a viatical settlement can take the pressure off, converting your life insurance into immediate cash!”

  Hazel held the phone to her ear, trying to figure out what the cheery man on the other end was saying. “What the hell are you selling?” she said.

  “Well, Mrs. Micallef, we’re not selling, we’re buying!” He pronounced it Mickeleff.

  “Mrs. Who? Buying what?”

  “Life insurance.”

  “Uh-huh. And how does this work?”

  “We purchase your life insurance – and the payouts, Mrs. Mickeleff, are very generous, up to eighty per cent of the benefit –”

  “What benefit?”

  “The, uh, death benefit.”

  “You goddamned vultures,” she rasped. Her mother was moving her spoon around in a bowl of soup, a shawl over her shoulders. “You invest in my death for a twenty per cent return?”

  “That’s not how –”

  “I’m sixty-four. You call me at lunch and ask to buy my life ins –”

  “Sixty-four? Is this Mrs. Emily Mikay … leff?”

  “This is her daughter, Hazel Micallef.”

  “Oh. Oh … well, Mrs. Micallef, have you yourself thought abou –”

  She hung up on him and returned to the table. “Who was that?” asked Emily.

  “Someone who wanted to buy shares in you, Mother.”

  “A rather unwise investment.”

  “I communicated that to him. Have some bread and butter.” Emily was looking at the simple spread – homemade vegetable soup and a sourdough loaf – with no interest. Hazel wasn’t sure what was keeping the old woman alive anymore. She didn’t eat, didn’t leave the house, rarely watched television except sometimes at night, when she couldn’t sleep, and then, only movies. She liked the strong female leads and the unbreakable men. Steve McQueen, Jane Fonda. Susan Sarandon and Sigourney Weaver a
nd Clint Eastwood. There’d come a moment in any movie Emily watched when she’d say, “Here comes the hammer.” If Hazel was watching with her, she’d add, “I love it when the hammer comes.”

  Otherwise, Emily spent most of her time in a fugue state between naps of varying lengths. Hazel had calculated that her mother was sleeping sixteen hours a day now. She rarely saw her before noon, and Emily used her strange new sleep habits as an excuse to miss both breakfast and lunch. She claimed she ate at four in the morning – tea and two Coffee Break cookies – but Hazel wasn’t so sure. She’d taken to counting the Coffee Breaks. Her mother ate them in spirals, snapping off the sugared edges and nibbling them like a rabbit. Her remaining identifying habits were listening to CBC Radio One and making acid commentary in her diminished but still ferocious voice.

  “Wheat is bad for you now,” she said.

  “So have a spoonful of butter. Get some calories down you. You look like a pair of chopsticks with a head.”

  “I have to be careful how oily I let my insides get, dear. I don’t want things sliding out.”

  “God,” said Hazel, slicing herself a second thick hunk of bread.

  Tuesday was her day off. The plan had been to stay home, get the leaves raked up and put into paper bags, spend some time with her mother. Hazel had tried to engage her in a game of cards, but Emily would have none of it. She didn’t want tea and neither did she want whiskey. She didn’t want to watch Bullitt, said she was too tired. “Tired from what?” Hazel asked her.

  “Everything. I don’t want to see Bullitt again.”

  “But Steve McQueen –”

  “Is dead.”

  She had a certain perspective on things these days. Hazel watched her stirring the soup in her bowl and the phone rang again. She snatched it up. “Good lord! Since when do you people call in the middle of the day?”

  “Hazel?” It was Ray Greene, her old friend, occasional nemesis, and the new commander of the Port Dundas Police Department. His voice was tight. “Have you heard from Sean Macdonald?”

  “I’m off today. What’s wrong?”

  “He’s not answering his radio. He went out on a call at eleven and MacTier hasn’t been able to raise him since noon.”

  “You’re kidding me. Not his –”

  “Not answering his cell. Goes straight to voicemail. It’s like he’s vanished into thin air.”

  “What was the call?”

  “A woman named Honey Eisen, on that new development outside of Dublin. He went down to take a statement from her. She teed off on someone’s knee with a granite pen holder.”

  “Ouch. You want me to go down?”

  “You’re closer and we’re on skeleton crew because I’m in Mayfair on a ‘sensitivity training’ seminar. The PD down here is sending a car, but they’ll wait for you unless, you know, there’s trouble.”

  “Sensitivity training.”

  Behind her, her mother said, “I’m just going to pour what’s left back into the pot,” and her spoon clinked against the bowl as she sloshed it out. “Are you staying home this afternoon?”

  “Apparently not,” Hazel said.

  Hazel Micallef drove the eighty-eight kilometres to Tournament Acres in thirty-five minutes. There was no Mayfair OPS officers present – she’d beaten them.

  Tournament Acres took up twenty hectares between the 15th and 17th sideroads to the west of Highway 41. Its north–south boundaries were Concession Roads 6 and 7. The land enclosed in that box of roads had till recently produced nothing but crops of corn and soy, just like most any other field in the area. But the land was much more valuable when you planted cheap, prefab bungalows and gave the fields a fancy name. Just the same, twenty per cent of the bungalows already built around the perimeter remained unsold: they were still available “from” $299,999. The Ascot Group – an American corporation that specialized in large-scale, pop-up communities complete with malls or golf courses or spas – had left half a dozen houses incomplete and made those people who had bought in antsy about the safety of their investments.

  Tournament Acres had been advertised and sold on the promise of its sumptuous country-club living and its two eighteen-hole courses. Now there was talk of building more bungalows where the second course was supposed to go – currently a sodden field of rotting corn stalks. People were incensed, and the Westmuir Record had been chewing the scenery over the debacle. The fact that most of the owners were from the Golden Horseshoe – Toronto, the 905, Hamilton – lent an air of schadenfreude to the talk about the ugly development, but Hazel felt for the investors. Retirees, mostly. People had spent their life-savings.

  Hazel drove to Honey Eisen’s address on Pebble Beach Boulevard, the new name for the 15th Sideroad, and found Macdonald’s cruiser outside the house. Hazel parked behind it and tried the driver’s door. She looked through the window, her hands cupped over her eyes, and inspected the inside of the cruiser. She found nothing abnormal about it, except that Macdonald wasn’t in the car. All the doors were locked.

  She looked around the area, over the fields to the east and at the discordant cottage-bungalows built on identical frames that lined the west side of the road. Around where Eisen lived, the houses and gardens were complete, but farther north, they were less finished, and a couple were still being framed. The development stopped altogether less than halfway up Pebble Beach Boulevard.

  She considered Mrs. Eisen’s dwelling. It had been done up in the same white wood as the clubhouse, with stuccoed columns in front. The front room throbbed white and blue with television light. Maybe Macdonald was in there watching reruns with the old lady. He’d always take a cup of tea if offered, and he was a tireless conversationalist, in both French and English. But three hours of chatting?

  She went up the walk and rang the doorbell. The flickering in the front window stopped. She rang again. The woman who answered wore a shapeless, pale-green dress over her bony frame. “Did you get it back?” she asked.

  “Did I get what back?”

  “Baby Jesus, do you people even talk to each other? My bone!”

  “May I come in, please?” Honey Eisen swept her arm out in mock welcome and Hazel entered. “Did a police officer named Macdonald come to –”

  “Well, that’s why you’re here, aren’t you? To arrest me.”

  “So he was here?”

  “You should arrest the people who are building this place. They don’t know what they’re doing. And Schnozzola covers for them every step of the way. You speak Jewish?”

  “No. Be quiet. Don’t say anything else because I’m not following most of it. Sergeant Macdonald was here, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “He left a … an hour ago at least.”

  “Do you know his cruiser is still parked outside of your house? He’s not in it.”

  Eisen went to the window of her front room. “He went to talk to Givens. It’s a two-minute drive!”

  “Who’s Givens?”

  “Brendan Givens. The property manager of this whole schmazzle. Do you golf?”

  “I don’t. Is Givens the person you struck with the pen holder?”

  “Oh, and they never built the wave pool either. It was supposed to be finished before anyone took possession. They’re cancelling the second course to build more bungalows, and they’ve presold – signed and sealed – so our protests are pointless. Why are they selling more parcels when they can’t finish the houses they’ve already sold?”

  “You smashed his knee because the golf courses aren’t finished?”

  “No. I … bonked him because he locked my bone in his desk.”

  “He locked your bone?”

  “Your sergeant was going to go over there and get it back. I want to show it to you people anyway.”

  “You don’t think it strange that he didn’t come back?”

  “I thought maybe he had to take it to a lab or something. I mean, it’s not my bone! I just found it. I was planting some bulbs out b
ack yesterday morning and my trowel went along something hard and scrapey. I thought it was a stone and I dug it out and it was a spine bone. Whatever you call it. I went right away to him, showed it to him. ‘What’s this?’ I said. He said it was probably from a horse, there were farms here with horses and sheeps and cows, but then he didn’t give it back. He locked it in his desk and said he’d look into it. But he’ll do what he does with all the complaints in this place: ignore it.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police first?”

  “I shoulda! You know, you people should be looking into him and the people he works for. You should nail them for whatever scam they’re working here on us poor old people and young couples. They advertised this place as paradise. It’s not. It’s a cesspool.”

  Hazel drove to the clubhouse, and was taken aback to find that the stretch of Concession Road 6 along the southern end of the development was now named Sam Snead Way. Whoever he was, she doubted he had ever stepped foot in Westmuir County. She drove through a pair of wrought-iron gates and parked behind a two-storey building stuccoed to look like white adobe. The woman in the rental office had no idea that a police officer’s car had been parked since about 1:00 p.m., with no one in it, on Pebble Beach Boulevard. She’d taken one look at Hazel’s cap and her whole face had shut down.

  Hazel showed her badge at the inner gate to the clubhouse itself, and was let through. A path led around the side of the building to a long, porticoed verandah facing the first tee. A sign explained that the clubhouse was modelled on the famous Pinehurst clubhouse in North Carolina, except this one had been built at one-quarter scale. It looked chintzy. Hazel guessed a well-placed spark would burn it down in less than two hours.

  The main concourse was done up in style, with marble floors and chandeliers in the foyer. Young, smiling women were stationed there to hand you a towel to take into the weight room or the indoor pool. She knocked on the door labelled Corporate Operations and a man in security uniform answered. “Do you have any ID?” he asked her.