Sunday, she stayed at home. Emily watched Thelma and Louise. For supper, Hazel made a chicken casserole with toasted Ritz crackers on top. Emily had a few hearty mouthfuls before running out of appetite. Hazel piloted her back in front of the television and turned on Discovery for her to watch MythBusters. After a while, Emily’s head drooped. Hazel turned the volume down and listened for her mother’s breath. She was still breathing.
She took out Frances Kelly’s number and went into the dining room. They hadn’t used it in more than two years. It had been a long while since she’d heard the voices of her mother’s friends cackling over cards in here. She dialled, and after a few rings a woman’s voice answered.
“Miss Kelly?” Hazel said.
“This is she.”
“I believe you spoke to a colleague of mine, Detective Sergeant James Wingate. My name is Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef. Do you have a few minutes to talk about the Dublin Boys Home and Charterhouse? You worked at both facilities in the fifties and sixties, correct?”
“That’s correct. I’m sorry I didn’t call back, but my sister has taken a turn for the worse and we were busy with her all weekend.”
“I hope she’ll be OK.”
“She won’t,” said Miss Kelly with calm finality. “She’s dying now. In and out of hospital. You’d put a dog down that was as sick as she is.” She sighed and sniffed back tears. “We are a cruel species.”
“I wish you and your family well,” Hazel said. “Is now a good time?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me: what were your tasks at the two homes, and were you employed by any others?”
“I worked a tick at the Fort Leonard Home, but most of my time I was at Dublin Home and Charterhouse.”
The name of Fort Leonard sent Hazel into a moment of dark reverie. That had been Alan’s home before he came to Port Dundas and became a Micallef. A good name, a trusted name in a small place, in a time when that was everything.
“How would you describe Dublin Home? When you were there in the late fifties?”
“Things were different then, as you probably can imagine …”
“I’ve lived in Port Dundas my whole life. I know things were different then. How were they different at Dublin Home?”
“I don’t want to give you the impression we were completely unenlightened. I worked in the infirmary, and I did my overnight shifts, as we all did. I can’t say everyone who lived there was happy – a lot of our boys came to us from real trouble, and there wasn’t enough money in the system back then, same as now. Society’s least gets least of its bounty. They squirrelled them away – the old folks, the unwanted kids, the natives and the mentally ill.
“From birth to age ten, it wasn’t unusual for some children to see the insides of five institutions. And some of them were born broken and some of them were special cases. Every child, if you want to know the truth, was a special case. I wanted to put each and every one of them in a warm house with a mother and father and maybe a sibling or two.”
“What happened if one of the boys died?” Hazel asked. “It must have happened.”
“Of course it happened. Boys weak to begin with sometimes succumbed, for instance if there was a flu or meningitis outbreak. We suffered our share of epidemics. If whooping cough came through it might take one or two with it. There were polio scares. And earlier on, before I did my RN, I heard they’d dealt with TB a number of times. Those old government homes incubated germs.”
“Were there ever any unusual deaths or suspicions of foul play?”
“Not that I was aware of.”
“Did you ever hear rumours that sometimes children disappeared in the night?”
Miss Kelly took a moment. “I don’t pay attention to rumour. It is almost always wrong.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
Suddenly Miss Kelly’s voice was raised. “I’ll be there in a minute, dear! Yes, this is my house, dear. You are sleeping in my house.” Hazel heard the phone being muffled. She imagined Miss Kelly had pressed the receiver against her clothing. Then she was back. “There was a boy one time who made it onto the roof and slipped on the stone slate and tumbled to his death. That’s the only time something like that happened, if you are looking for something unusual.”
“Do you recall when that was?”
“New Year’s of ’58 or ’59.”
“Do you remember his name?”
“Not his last name. He was called Valentijn. A simple boy, big and playful. Covered in hair by the age of thirteen. The other boys liked him, but he was trouble.”
“You saw this Valentijn? You saw his body?”
“No, I wasn’t on shift, but I came in the next morning and all the children were upset, talking among themselves.”
“What did the children think had happened to him?”
“They were worked up about it,” Miss Kelly said. “Especially the younger boys. They were sure Old Father Crumb had come in the night.”
“Old Father Crumb?”
“It was a ghost story,” she said. “Something the older boys terrorized the little ones with. If you heard the night bell, it meant Old Father Crumb had come in the night. It was a sort of campfire story, you see? I never met a person named Crumb though, but that day they were buzzing with it.”
“Where was Valentijn buried?”
“Back then, I’m afraid, if you had no next of kin to take your body, you were just buried in a potter’s field. I think there was one in Mayfair. No names, no markers. Poor boy he was, and now no one knows he walked the earth.”
“You know,” said Hazel. “And I do, too.”
The new week began with an email message from Cutter that came in the form of a jpeg. It was a photo of Renald beaten black and blue. He was holding a piece of card on which was written: THIS IS NOT MY HALLOWEEN COSTUME.
Hazel looked away. “Jesus, Ray. Don’t spread that.”
“What do you want to do?”
“What’s the email address?”
“Tell me what you want to say.”
Something about the tone of his voice. “Why? Show me.” She went around his desk and looked. The sender was named [email protected]. She grabbed the keyboard away.
She clicked reply and wrote: If you harm him any further, I’ll make sure you never go to trial.
“Hazel!”
She pressed send.
“Is there anything that pops into your head you ignore?”
“I mean it, too,” she said.
Cartwright appeared at the office door. “Sorry to interrupt, but you just got a call from ChemLab Forensic in Toronto. It’s a match.”
“Is he still on the line?”
“Nope. He just said there was a 98.9 per cent chance that Mr. Maracle is related by blood to the sample you provided. That was it. He said it was a yes or no proposition, and I was to tell you yes, although if you want more certainty than that, it’ll take another week. But –” she looked down at the note she was holding “– he also said that there was only one chance in forty-six billion that it was a false positive.”
Hazel and Greene looked at each other. “That closes the circle, then,” she said. “Eloy Maracle. We know one of our victims now.” She got up.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going to deliver the news to his brother in person. And I think I’ll have a couple of new questions for him.”
“In the meantime?” he asked.
“Keep Wingate working the records. Let him stay as long as he wants.”
Hazel was in Toronto by 9:30. Claude Maracle’s address was in Mimico, down by the lake, the southeast corner of Etobicoke. An old enclave of the city. There was no answer at his door. She went over to Lakeshore Boulevard and had a coffee.
ChemLab had faxed their report. She went over it again. Its stark math was certain: Claude and the bones shared the same parents. Fate had divided them, but science had made them brothers again.
The
second time she rang, a tall, dark-skinned man answered the door. His eyes were blue and tired. “Help you?”
“We spoke by phone last week, Mr. Maracle. I’m Detective Inspector Hazel –”
“Yeah,” he said, and he stood aside. “They came and took hair and blood.”
She waved the folder with the report in it as if it could do the talking for her. “I’ve got the results from the lab.”
He led her into a room where a chair, upholstered in a worn beige fabric, faced the television. There was a couch and a coffee table to one side, but it was clear no one had sat on the couch for some time. He gestured to it, but she felt she couldn’t sit yet.
“I’m afraid I have bad news.”
“What other is there?”
“Some of the bones we found behind Dublin Home belong to your brother. It’s all in this report,” she said, leaning sideways to put the folder down on the coffee table.
“I believe you.” He was resigned in his manner. “I don’t need that. It doesn’t change anything. So now you think he was murdered. That’s what you’ve come to tell me?”
“It’s my duty to tell you.”
“Sit down now, would you? I’m not going to offer you anything because you’re not staying long.” She sat. “You know who killed him?”
“We’re not sure yet. We have some ideas, but most of our suspects are dead. This happened so long ago now. We’ve found some men who were once in Dublin Home as boys, but you’re the only one who can put a name to a victim. Tell me, did you know a boy called Valentijn Deasún?”
“Valentijn. Yes, I knew him. He was Eloy’s friend.”
“He died in 1959. But how?”
“He fell to his death. From a window or a roof.”
“That’s what you heard?”
“It was a sunny morning on a winter’s day, then they drew all the curtains. That’s all I remember. After that, we had to spend the day in our dorms.”
“Did anyone see him fall?”
“I don’t think anyone saw him fall.”
“Do you think he killed himself?”
Maracle leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees. “Most of us were just trying to survive. I don’t know if he killed himself.”
“Eloy was his friend?”
“You wanted my brother on your side. Or he might do the opposite of protect you. He was good to the weaker kids and the young ones. Everyone was nice to the babies. So he kept an eye on Valentijn, because he was big and clumsy and feeble-minded. I never saw him do too much violence to his fellow inmates. He saved his worst rages for the staff.”
“Who did Eloy dislike in particular? Was there anyone he had a lot of run-ins with, or conflict?”
“He would get mad and do something about it. He broke the arm of an orderly fifty pounds heavier than himself. But not taller. Eloy got tall genes. I got my grandfather’s blue eyes and my mother’s ability to suffer.”
Hazel wondered when the last time was that this man thought he still had a chance. Maybe his brother had been the lucky one, his life arrested before he learned where it was headed. If he could see his surviving brother’s fate, Eloy might think his own painless.
“What happened after he broke the orderly’s arm?”
“They transferred him out. Juvie, I don’t know. I didn’t hear from him and then I got a letter saying he’d died of influenza. I’d been with the Wetherlings for six months by then.”
“Tell me about the night bell. Or Old Father Crumb.”
He looked away quickly.
“Are they just stories?”
“Who told you?”
“A couple of people. One of them named Frances Kelly.”
“Nurse Kelly. She’s still alive, is she?”
“I spoke to her by phone. Obviously she’s much older now.”
“Nurse Kelly lives, but my brother is chopped to pieces and forgotten on the tenth green.”
“Along with others. Was there a night bell?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you ever hear something you weren’t expecting to hear in the night?”
“No.”
“But boys were found dead. Or they disappeared.”
“Boys came and went. It was not our place to ask why.” He rubbed the base of his throat with his hand. “How many boys?” he asked without looking up.
“We’re up to eighteen different DNA profiles. There may be more.”
“What a piece of work is a man.” He looked up. “What is going to happen to my brother’s bones?”
“When we close the case, we can give them to you for a proper burial.”
His eyes were far away. “I don’t want to be part of your case, Detective Inspector. I won’t testify, and I don’t want to make a statement or whatever it is you call it. If it’s possible for me to have Eloy’s remains, someone can communicate that to me, but otherwise, I don’t want to hear from you again and I don’t want you to use my name. Do I have your word on it?”
] 23 [
Monday, October 29, afternoon
The Ladyman Café was packed as usual for lunch, and Monday lunches, in particular, were desperate affairs with people escaping their kitchens for the first time in two days. Hazel had made it back to Port Dundas in record time. She and Ray sat at the counter.
“So the idea was to get rid of anyone who shouldn’t be allowed to leave the home and enter society,” Hazel said.
“Three boys is not a strong foundation for a theory,” he replied.
“Valentijn Deasún – described as strong but simple by two people. Eloy Maracle – native, strong and out of control. Violent. Charles Shearing, a dark-skinned adolescent.” She swirled the ice in her glass and watched the light bounce around it. “You’d have to do it differently every time. Cover it up differently. Valentijn’s record ends at Dublin Home. He’s shown as deceased in their records, but there’s no death certificate.”
“It’s lost, someone screwed up – there’re a hundred explanations.”
“Eloy’s record showed he was transferred to another institution. James checked every angle. The place he was sent to never registered him as a ward of the province. He never arrived. And we know he’s in that field.”
Ray turned his wedding ring on his finger, thinking. “Who could have gotten away with that?”
“Anyone, I suppose. But if you were efficiently killing and then getting rid of the bodies, nursing or medical training would be a good thing to have.”
He shook his head and then moved his arms off the counter to make room for the two plates that had just arrived.
“Toasted western with mayo, fries.”
“Me,” said Hazel.
“Toasted western, fries, mayo on the side.”
“You’ve been serving us the same lunch for twenty years,” Ray said to the man behind the counter.
“I like saying it. How come you never sit where your dads sat? You move all over – booth, table, counter – but never where they sat.”
“I don’t know.” Greene squinted at him in mock challenge. “I guess I want to establish my own legend.”
“You know why your father sat at the end of the bar, Ray? Because the second time he forgot to pay, my father told him he had to eat in the corner where he could keep an eye on him.” He patted the counter in front of them, laughing. “Eat up.”
Hazel looked at Ray’s plate. “Why do you ask for cold mayo on the side?”
“If they put the mayo on in the kitchen, it’s practically leaking out of the sandwich when he brings it.”
She took a bite and made a yum face at him. “We need a witness, Ray. Somebody who saw it with their own eyes. Maybe that person is Yoshida.”
“No answer still?”
“I’m going to go up there.”
“When?”
“If he doesn’t pick up this afternoon, I’ll go up and poke around. You ever been to Dunneview?”
“Sure. Half of the main drag’s been shuttered s
ince I was a kid.”
“It’s almost all shuttered now. Last time I knew what its population was, it was under six hundred.”
“You better hope Mr. Yoshida is one of the people who stayed.”
“Well, that’s where his phone supposedly rings.”
Hazel got back to her desk and looked at the time: 2:20 p.m. She could get to Dunneview and back in five hours. But in five hours at the station, she could start planning for the last phase of the case: naming the victims. That was going to be a whole other database: finding kin, collecting blood, matching genetic signatures, entering it into a database. She imagined the dead rising from the fields for roll call.
She was proud of herself – and of James even more so – for summiting the mountains of data that had revealed the missing boys they’d found so far. For how many years had someone been permitted to carry out the scheme?
“Hazel.” Wingate was standing in her doorway. He was in jeans and a white T-shirt.
She laughed. “Finally.”
“What?”
“You look gay.” He laughed. She hadn’t seen a smile on his face in quite a while.
“Only you and Kraut are confident enough to joke with me.”
“Kraut jokes about it?”
“Oh yeah.”
“And you don’t mind.”
“In the coffee lounge Forbes was talking about finding a new apartment –”
“He and Olivia break up again?”
“Yeah. He’s poring over the rentals online and he says ‘How big is a bachelor?’ And Kraut says, ‘Ask Wingate.’ ”
“Oh my god,” she said, covering her mouth. “What did you say?”
“I said I counted on him to have my back.”
Hazel laughed into her palm. “Please tell me that’s what you really said.”
“I did.”
He was looking at her strangely, she thought. “Are you here to say goodbye?”
“Oh, yeah, I’m off. Any luck with Yoshida?”
“No answer. I was going to go today but I’ve got too much paper on my desk. I’ll go tomorrow. Get some rest.”
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