The Night Bell

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  “Where were you last night, Mr. Givens? Say, after eleven o’clock?”

  “I was monkeyfucking drunk. In my suite.”

  “Were you with anyone?”

  He sneered. “Sure. I was with my harem.”

  “I’m sorry to have to ask. You knew the Fremonts, surely.”

  “Lovely people. They had me over for canapés after they moved in.”

  Wingate’s head went canned apes. “Do you think anyone would have had a reason to harm them?”

  “Oh, gosh no.” Givens reached for a shot glass from the cart, filled it from the decanter, and drank it down. “They kept to themselves.”

  “Were they on any of the homeowners’ committees? Did they have problems with their property, for instance?”

  “How many years do you think separates them? I bet you can’t guess.”

  “Fourteen.”

  “How did you know?”

  “They’re dead. I know how old they were.” Givens reflected on this. “Can anyone vouch for your whereabouts between eleven last night and six a.m.?”

  Givens clicked the monitor off with his remote and came around the front of the desk. He walked hoppingly, using the desk for support. “Would you like to know how it works?” His body blocked the light from the window behind. The glow from the kliegs around the Fremont house made a halo of gauzy light around his body. “First, you buy some shitty land somewhere between a city and where people really wish they could live when they retire. You can sell them bungalows with a shopping centre or brick-veneer semis with a mosque or fully detached, luxury living with a golf course. In some US states you can even give them a casino. The key is to sell forty-nine per cent. Fifty-one per cent unsold and you’re still the majority shareholder, and you can walk away. You’ve made a killing on forty-nine per cent of the cheap houses you built. Notice how only half the houses advertised have been built.”

  “I noticed that. Is it all legal?”

  “Yeah, it’s legal. You have to insure the hell out of it. But when the lawsuits come, if they do, you’ve not only got that all-important one per cent on your side. People always settle. They just want money anyway. You’d be amazed what they settle for.”

  “Why are you telling me this? Is someone pissed off?”

  “How much you want to bet I’m the next body?” He grunted a laugh.

  Wingate had left his notebook in his pocket. Being more or less off-duty, he wasn’t supposed to be taking notes, but it would look good, he thought. “You sound like you’re looking forward to it.”

  “Anything to get out of this racket. Living in half-finished paradises a year at a time? Think you can meet a woman like that?”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “And get this,” he said, ready to spill. “The homeowners own their dwellings and the land they’re on, but the corporation owns all the common property and runs its services. A lot of places they’re the gas resellers, even.”

  “Gas resellers?”

  “They buy natural gas in bulk and become the vendors to their own developments at higher-than-market prices. It’s written into the contract. Something about the cost of new infrastructure. They make a killing.”

  “Do you think someone associated with this development killed the Fremonts?”

  “Look at this,” Givens said. He hobbled back behind his desk. He unlocked a drawer out of sight and returned with a huge hanging file folder. “I think you may find this interesting reading.”

  “What is this?”

  “All the deals. You know the second course got sold to a consortium? They’re the ones that are building the low-rise. No one wants to fucking play golf here except the homies. You know, the people who own the homes. No green fees, no events. It’s a par sixty-three for chrissake. The land is worth more with people in boxes than balls in holes.”

  “What about with bones scattered all over it?”

  “Much less,” said Givens, raising his glass as if to give a toast. “Much less.”

  The following morning, the field team was back out in the stalks, sweeping. They were on rotating eight-hour shifts. Willan had signed off on it without hesitation. It took the rest of that day, and most of the next, to complete the sweep. By the end of the weekend, they had collected nine more bone fragments, bringing the total to twelve.

  There had not been a word about or from Melvin Renald. Macdonald had come up empty. There were no surveillance cameras keeping track of what was happening in the northern parts of the swampy field, where Sergeant Costamides had last seen Renald; for all intents and purposes, he’d vanished without a trace. His wife, Janet, was apoplectic. She was already accusing someone of “dusting” her husband.

  “How much do you know about the guy?” Hazel asked Ray Greene near the end of her Sunday shift. “He’s your boy now.”

  “I’ve known him exactly as long as you have. Solid guy, typical stats, a sonofabitch, hard, one-quarter stupid. Effective. There are lots of people in policing like Melvin Renald. Go from one shop to another and never for the same reason. Some people are just restless.”

  “Meanwhile, he vanishes while on duty and a couple of hours later someone juliennes the Fremonts. To show that they’re serious?”

  “How sure are you that the voice on Renald’s radio wasn’t his?”

  “A hundred per cent.”

  Ray Greene tapped the end of his pen against his blotter. The way you do when you’re coming to a decision: fast. “Well, we’ve got more trouble coming than one of our own vanishing in a field: the minister of public safety is coming to see Chip Willan first thing tomorrow morning.”

  Hazel knit her face into a sneer. “Why?”

  “I understand it might have something to do with the Fremonts.”

  “Ha!” she said. “Please tell me Chip Willan is a suspect.”

  “I don’t think the Mounties get called in to investigate small-town murders.”

  “Are you telling me we’re off the case?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Monday morning, Ray Greene delivered the news that the minister of public safety was putting the RCMP on the Fremont case. “It’s not my decision!” he called over the heckling. News had already gone out, and off-duty personnel filled the pen. He thought he noticed a union rep or two as well. “When the minister of public safety comes to town, he gets what he wants.” His eyes shuttled back and forth between Hazel Micallef – steaming mad – and all the bodies in the pen. “Now everyone get back to work.”

  He crooked his finger at Hazel and she followed him into his makeshift office. “We’re to hand over copies of our files for both the dead children and for the Fremont murder.”

  “They’re taking over both cases? I thought they were interested in the Fremonts.”

  “Apparently they’re also interested in the poor orphans.”

  “And Renald?” She was boiling over quickly.

  “They’re leaving us with our own investigation.”

  “This is bullshit. Cockeyed … fucking bullshit. How are we supposed to hunt for the people who have taken Renald if the rest of the case is off limits to us?”

  “You’ll find a way. Isn’t that how you like to work? I just want to be sure that you understand though – you can’t set foot down there.”

  “Whose grip are your balls in?” He bored a hole through her with his eyes. “I understand.”

  “Does I understand mean I won’t?”

  “It means I won’t. I won’t go near it.”

  “I don’t like it either,” he said, relaxing some. “The union is muttering about it, too. They’re saying this affects the whole membership and makes them look weak.”

  “If anything, it makes the minister look like he’s covering something up.”

  “The reputation of the force is reflected in how the community sees its individual members. I’m just telling you how they see it.”

  “Willan must be relieved, at least. No more overtime. I guess I�
��ll go back to my desk,” she said, “to work a case or something.” Like hell, she thought, getting into her cruiser.

  The Dublin Home for Boys had been built on the corner of a plot of land that belonged to the home but was rent-farmed. From a cursory online search, Hazel learned that it had opened in 1911 and functioned as a home for neglected and abandoned boys until the mid-1960s, when it was closed. It had rarely been used since that time, although when Hazel was in her twenties it was sometimes the site of a bingo fundraiser for one of the charities in nearby Dublin, or the county rented it out for small concerts or cultural festivals. She also vaguely remembered a corn maze in that field – how old had she been then?

  She’d been in the building only once in recent times, and that was for a local meeting convened in the 1980s to discuss county highway improvements – ironic (she thought now) given what was passing for improvement these days. The conversation – in when was it, 1988? – had been about how to accommodate increased traffic in the region in a way that would most benefit the businesses along such an artery. It was about local economic health, not consolidation, not cost-cutting, not bang for buck. It was about people and livelihoods. Quality of life.

  They’d finally shuttered the building in 1993.

  She drove her own car there and pulled off the overgrown driveway into a scatter of apple trees that hid the vehicle from the roads. The cold, stone building still dominated its square of earth like an abandoned castle. Behind it was the grey-green muck of the field and the tall, wood-slat fence that kept the mess out of view for those who lived along its perimeter. The fencing behind the houses on the 17th Sideroad came only partway toward Concession Road 7 – “Augusta Avenue” – as there were no houses or tenants yet beyond the finished bungalows. The finished ten holes were in the southeastern part of the development, and she could barely see the course from where she stood.

  Most of these provincial institutions – including old age homes and sanitariums – had been self-sufficient in some way. There would have been a vegetable garden here, and the apple trees had once been a small orchard, judging from the way the surviving trees were spaced.

  There was no graveyard on this side of the home, and there was nothing she could see beyond it but the development’s soggy fields. The home had fallen into total disrepair after fourteen years. All of the windows were boarded up, but many of the boards, over time, had come loose or fallen off. It gave the house an aura of silent chaos. The lights along the driveway and above the door had been smashed a long time ago, and none of the glass remained on the ground. She imagined a whole generation of teenagers on banana bikes testing their arms with stones until there was nothing left to bust.

  A piece of plywood sealed the entryway. Warped and cracked with years of weathering, it was still tight. It wouldn’t budge. She went around to the west side of the building, where she was still concealed from view, and looked for another way in. There were no ground-level windows and no doors, but around the back she encountered evidence of the home’s mechanical functions: pipes poked out of the mortar in a couple of places and two steel ducts beside a chute of some kind angled down from the wall. Below the chute, a yellow patch of poisoned vegetation.

  With much caution, ensuring she was not visible, even distantly, Hazel went over to take a closer look. She bent down and peered up into the chute. It was caked in black soot and smelled of decades of smoke and ash. She swept her hand around in the yellow bramble, but found nothing.

  Beside the chute, a small wooden door had been nailed shut, but she was able to work a corner open and then tear the whole door off. She snapped on her penlight and stepped into the dark, musty space beyond. She passed the thin penlight beam around the room and discovered an all-purpose workshop, with a large metal box against one wall that vented to the chute she’d seen. The incinerator. Its mouth was too high up to look into, and anyway, she wasn’t so sure she wanted to see what was inside it on her own.

  The rest of the space was clogged with machines draped in cobwebs, and huge dustballs had gathered at the base of the few bolted to the floor: a drill press, a table saw, and a lathe. These had been stripped for parts over the years. She noted some folded tarps in a corner, and a few cans of old paint with rusted lids. There was nothing else of interest in the room. The door in the far wall was locked by a bolt, which Hazel wiggled open with a bit of effort. The door gave onto a set of tilted wooden steps that led up to the main floor.

  The foyer behind the boarded front door was cavernous and intimidating. She recalled an assembly room at the rear of the building, over the workshop in fact, and started there. Wooden bleachers lined both sides of the room, but the middle was empty. The rotted stage curtain was drawn back. Her footsteps echoed crisply against the hard surface of the walls. She took the steps up to the stage carefully and stood looking out at the abandoned auditorium, imagining faces in the gloom. The faces of unwanted children at the mercy of whatever system had landed them here. Was this a place of celebration or of worship, or was it disquiet that ruled here? Or fear?

  The rest of the ground level was given over to classrooms behind imposing wooden doors. They were all empty, their furniture long ago redistributed to other schools. Chalkboards busy with pale grey lines looked blankly out over empty rooms. Layers of ground-in chalk from the hundreds of classes taught here made a diary of sorts, its pages all jumbled. In Room 103, she made out the words to eat soap, and in 107, down the opposite hallway, a rolling chalkboard crawled with numbers and symbols. The classrooms were drab, washed-out, as if they were old pictures that had been left in the sun. The only other rooms on this floor were the registrar’s office, the dining room, and the kitchen.

  The second floor was dormitories and bathrooms. Here, she pictured the throng of small bodies rushing to and fro. Voices. She imagined the dorm rooms, with their white, iron bedframes arranged higgledy-piggledy everywhere, cold from the air coming through the windows. Standing at one of them, she looked out over the fields where her colleagues had swept for bone. Why no windows in the sides of the building? Maybe it had been a cost issue. It would have been hard to heat a stone monstrosity such as this; windows would have let out much of the warmth generated.

  Alan had remembered his dormitory at Fort Leonard as cold. That was all he talked about when he described what it had been like. The cold. The cold floors, the cold beds, the cold toilet seats. The cold food. She’d never been to the place where Alan spent the first ten years of his life, but she couldn’t imagine it being much different than this one. This was how her little brother had lived. Crowded in with others, forced to line up to eat, to pee, to enter class. She wondered if they’d ever been let out into the fields to play.

  Her brother had come into her life like a firecracker thrown through her window. He arrived when he was ten and she was twelve, and he had stayed in their home to the age of twenty. By then he was too much to handle. Drinking, petty theft, getting into fights and accidents. He confided to her later on that he’d suffered from crushing depression for as long as he could remember. She knew this about him, although he’d not spoken of it until they were both adults. She remembered how his face would change colour when a dark mood took over. It would purple, was how she saw it in her mind’s eye. Like a bruise.

  Dead twenty-three years. Made it to thirty-nine. He’d surprised people by making it to thirty. Standing in this empty dorm room at Dublin Home, she felt the shadow of her brother’s despair laid out before her.

  Outside, the air smelled clean again. Hazel leaned over, her palms braced against her thighs, and breathed in and out, slowly. After a minute she’d collected herself, and she lifted her head. Across the road, the fields went on north, with little stands of trees where stone had been deposited when the woods were first cleared. Here and there, among the scarlet and orange, a flare of pure yellow, the yellow of a lemon tart, caught her eye – maple leaves, all bursting bright at the same time. They gilded the distance, too. Patches of gold pasted to a b
lue sky.

  So how would you get rid of a lot of bone? Flesh is nothing, it boils away in fire and sometimes leaves nothing but a slick. The bone burns too, but some of it always remains. There was bone at Hiroshima. An incinerator wouldn’t do the job.

  And how many bodies? Had all the unburned chunks been strewn in the fields?

  She turned on her heel. Say this was the epicentre. If half as much bone lay in the nearest fields, that would be, conservatively – what? – a total of twenty fragments? Possibly upward of a dozen young men and boys, none of whom had ever been reported missing, whose bodies had been carefully disposed of under the eye of someone with total freedom of movement. A headmaster? A cook or janitor? The groundskeeper?

  She’d hoped a small, hidden patch of headstones would offer her another interpretation. But she walked the periphery of the small plot, and there was nothing.

  The ash would have been easy to get rid of. It would have been incorporated into the soil wherever it landed or was dumped. A dozen rainstorms and it was gone. There would have been meal once the bone fragments were sifted away, probably a lot of it. It’s good mixed into garden soil.

  The apple tree beside her car twisted down and in on itself, and the last of its fruit clung to the orange-leaved branches. The apples were diseased. She picked one and inspected it. Black impressions pocked its wrinkled skin – a canker, the farmers called it. It meant cancer. The apple felt hollow in her hand. She dropped it onto the ground where it cracked into halves.

  When she looked up, she saw flashing lights streaming toward her. They came from the south and the east, along the old 17th Sideroad and Concession Road 7. They were white cars with a slash of multicoloured ribbon across their doors and a big coat of arms. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

  ] 11 [

  Monday, October 22, late afternoon

  The autopsy report on the Fremonts arrived at the end of the day. COURTESY, the RCMP envelope was stamped. The photographs were appalling.