The Night Bell

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  “I will.”

  Wingate pulled out onto Main Street. He took the bridge over the Kilmartin River and drove along the 117 below the Lion’s Paw. When the town was behind him, he pulled off onto a patch of gravel, got out, and removed his uniform from the trunk. He got into the back seat of his cruiser to put it on. It was difficult enough to walk or sit down or stand up, but getting his long form twisted around in the seat to put on pants was black-belt stuff for his banged-up body. He hit his head on the roof when he shrugged his shirt over his shoulders. The motor and the lights were off, but someone would notice an empty police car. He struggled the jacket on and reached for his black shoes.

  After a pause, he emerged dressed in uniform and got back behind the wheel. He pulled onto the road and followed it away from town onto Highway 41. A few minutes later, a sign went by that gave the distance to Dunneview as 231 kilometres.

  According to what he’d been able to find out on the weekend, Hibiki Yoshida was a Japanese boy found on a ship in 1950, a stowaway alone on a tanker that had last been in port in the Philippines. He’d found a story in the Toronto Star’s online archive. He was seven and he was sent to live at Dublin Home, and he wasn’t adopted for ten years. The adoptive family was a childless Jewish couple who took Hibiki back to Toronto. But when he retired, he returned to Westmuir County and settled in Dunneview. He hadn’t married, and he was on the tax rolls at a Dunneview address.

  Wingate got to the town just after 5:00 p.m. All its main street was missing were the tumbleweeds. The side streets, however, reminded him of North Toronto, where he and Michael had grown up. Low-slung bungalows among old brick homes. For a moment he thought he could smell the particular combination of drying maple and willow leaves that had once been proof of autumn there.

  He pulled up outside Yoshida’s house and parked. The blinds were drawn and the house appeared empty from the outside. It was one of the red brick houses, with yellow brick trim around its windows and doors. An old house. The driveway was wide enough for two cars, but nothing was parked there.

  He unfolded his body from the cruiser and walked up to the door, aware that if anyone saw a policeman they would be concerned and perhaps the neighbours would come to see. It took the entire walk to Yoshida’s front door for him to straighten his body out. He rang the bell once. Hazel liked to knock, but he preferred a single musical tone to announce his presence. It suggested that something serious required the homeowner’s attention.

  There was no sign that anyone was at home. He waited. His mind flickered one way and the other, between the 1980s in Willowdale and here, more than four hundred kilometres and two decades away. For a moment, the door he stood before had his family behind it: his brother, their parents.

  A man opened the door. He was Japanese, with deep-set, intelligent eyes. He wore drawstring pants and a light-blue T-shirt that hung over his narrow frame. “Yes?”

  “Hibiki Yoshida?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Sergeant Detective James Wingate, from the Port Dundas OPS. I’m wondering if I might talk to you.”

  Yoshida looked to the street. “On all the shows, the police work in twos.”

  “Budget cuts. And this isn’t a call. I mean, I’m not responding to a call. I just have a couple of questions concerning a case I’m working.”

  “Come in.”

  The house was small and very tidy, with blond-wood floors and cabinetry. From floor to ceiling along one wall in the living room, built-in shelves of dark pine held books in a number of languages. There was a single potted ficus, and above a black fireplace one thing on the wall: a curved sword in its scabbard, mounted on wooden supports.

  “That come in handy much?”

  “It may one day.”

  “You should come to the door with it.”

  Yoshida guffawed. “That would keep the brush-sellers away! It’s an antique sword,” he said. “It belonged to my great-grandfather. I am an only son, so I inherited it.”

  “Have you always had it?” Wingate asked.

  “No. I tracked it down. It’s the only thing that connects me to my family. I had it sharpened.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe one day I’ll need to defend myself. Or cut a tomato into paper-thin slices.” He laughed again. He gestured for Wingate to sit in a chair before a large, potbellied stove. On one of the two burner plates, a cast-iron teapot was keeping warm. “That fireplace is two hundred years old. I don’t trust it since it set the roof on fire, so I put this stove in. I can make eggs and bacon on top of it, and tea. Sometimes I sit here all day and read and drink tea. Would you like a cup?”

  “OK,” Wingate said. Michael had turned him on to the power of different teas. “What is it?”

  “Gyokuro. A green tea.”

  Wingate accepted a small ceramic cup. His mind was still partly in a memory and it made the present unreal. “Why do you not answer your phone?”

  Yoshida turned his head and pointed to his ear. There was a tiny pink hearing aid in it. “I don’t wear this if I’m home alone. I like the way being hard of hearing is sometimes like being in a cloud, far away from everything.”

  “How did you hear the doorbell?”

  “I have a light there – see it? – and one upstairs. They flash. Is this a test?”

  “No sir.”

  “Then how can I help you?”

  “The Ontario Police Services are looking into allegations of a … an … abuse at the Dublin Home for Boys. You were there between 1950 and 1960. You were adopted by Joe and Zelda Rubins of Toronto. You went back to your birth name?”

  “Yes,” he said. “My adoptive parents are dead. I have always thought of myself as Yoshida.”

  “I suppose it might have been a little strange in the sixties living with a Jewish family.”

  “I think that some tradition instead of none at all was good for me. And I make a mean brisket. I marinate it in soy sauce and mirin wine. Tell me what you mean by abuse.”

  “Do you remember a boy who fell from the roof?”

  “Yes. I do. He was in the snow in the morning, on his back, and there was frost on his blue face.”

  “You saw him?”

  “I was the one who found him.”

  Wingate took his notebook out. “Do you remember his name?”

  “Desoon.”

  “Like this?” Wingate wrote Deasún on a page.

  “I don’t think I ever saw it written.”

  “Valentijn.”

  “Yes. Valentijn Deasún. They said he fell from the roof.”

  “Do you think it was an accident?”

  “No. I don’t, not anymore. I’ve spent my life reading about these places. Anything I can get my hands on.”

  “You mean anything Leon Cutter has sent you.”

  “We’ve kept each other up to date with our discoveries. His interests are more local than mine. I could show you many things you can’t find at the archives.”

  “How many of you have been working on this case? Cutter’s been in the archives, what – twenty-six years? He must have got that position to gain access to provincial records. What do you do?”

  Yoshida smiled. He was a ridiculously calm and sunny man. “I was at the Ministry of Child and Youth Services. I worked as a placement officer for the public adoptions department. I’m retired now. But I had access to government records Leon could never get.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, the public knows now what the priests and hockey coaches were doing. But you don’t know half of what went on in this country’s asylums and nursing homes and foster care homes and even hospitals. I have evidence of forced sterilizations, abortion without the patient’s consent, even euthanasia. And eugenics.”

  “Eugenics?”

  “Selective breeding. Well, retroactive selective breeding.”

  “Murdering people before they can reproduce.”

  “There’s also this.” Yoshida rose from his chair and disappeared into anot
her room. He returned with a small stack of stapled papers and put them down on a side table. “These are internal bulletins put out by a foundation called the Ontario Parents’ Information Centre. It operated out of Kitchener and it had an office in Mayfair as well.”

  “What was it?”

  “They advocated for contraception. There were a couple of court cases in the sixties when one of the centre’s nurses was arrested for handing out condoms to women.”

  “Sounds like a pretty modern approach.”

  “On the surface. But the president of the foundation – his name was A.R. Merchant – established it in order to bring contraception only to certain communities. Places where English was not the first language, neighbourhoods where the skin colour was not white – that’s where they went. In their internal literature,” Yoshida said, pointing to the stack of bulletins, “the foundation called these groups ‘welfare risks and underearners.’ Merchant targeted women, hiding behind his foundation and spreading a gospel of ‘choice’ before the idea really caught on. Except he wanted to prevent them from passing on their genes …”

  “What does this have to do with Dublin Home?”

  “I saw Merchant there. He was a regular visitor. I didn’t know who he was until I got older and undertook my research, but when I saw his face, I knew he was the same man.” He took a bulletin and opened it to the third page, where a photo of Merchant was printed at the top of his monthly address to his readers. He had a warm, horsey face marked with laugh lines. “That’s him. As he looked.”

  “Why would he visit the home?”

  “I believe he went from orphanage to asylum to hospital, offering information and perhaps supplies at times. There are no clear records of the role he might have played, but it’s not unreasonable to think that he consulted on sterilization at some of these institutions, and maybe even performed some of them himself.”

  “Was he a doctor?”

  “No.”

  Wingate shuddered involuntarily. “Did someone perform those kinds of procedures at Dublin Home?”

  “I don’t know. In the ten years I lived there, doctors and nurses came and went.”

  “You believe that Deasún’s death was not an accident. Were there other suspicious deaths? Disappearances?”

  “Boys came and went. You never knew why.”

  “I heard some of them disappeared in the night.”

  Yoshida looked at him squarely, as if to gauge what he could trust Wingate with. “If a boy was going to another home or getting a family, we’d say goodbye to him at lunch and they’d leave in the afternoon. Some kids they took at night. No one ever heard from them, and no one ever talked about it. It was like they’d never been born.”

  Wingate put the bulletins into an evidence bag and tore the backing off the adhesive. “Would you testify?”

  “Merchant is dead. The rest of them are elderly or dead themselves. Who is there to testify against?”

  “I’m only asking if you would be willing.”

  Yoshida thought about it. “I suppose I would, except I don’t know how admissible my memories would be.”

  “Was there such a thing as the night bell?”

  “Yes.” Yoshida’s eyes were no longer laughing. “I know because I heard it. Twice.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  He’d stayed longer than he’d intended – it was past 6:00 p.m. Michael was making kale soup and a raw-food chili. Michael’s way of eating had no doubt helped his body recover in the last year, but kale soup was a cure worse than the disease. Still, he didn’t want to hurt his brother’s feelings. He sent a text: Held up at work, home at 9:30. He put the evidence bag of bulletins on the passenger seat and pulled away from the curb.

  He drove through the dying town and out to the access road that led back to Highway 41 without seeing a living soul. At the last light before getting on the road back to Port Dundas, he felt the cold muzzle of a gun at the base of his skull.

  “Don’t turn around, buddy.” A man’s voice. “I won’t hurt you if you co-operate.” Wingate felt the cold steel rise into his hair and come to rest directly behind his eyes. He glimpsed at his rear-view mirror.

  Leon Cutter said, “Now drive north.” Wingate started driving. “Send your radio, your phone, and your gun back here. Careful now.”

  “I don’t have a gun,” Wingate said. He passed the phone and radio back.

  “Oh right, you’re on admin duty, aren’t you? Do you even have your badge?”

  “No.”

  Cutter laughed softly. “I like your style. I think I can lower my gun.”

  “I was hoping you would.” Wingate’s shoulders came down as he felt the muzzle pull away from his scalp.

  “One false move –”

  “Would kill us both,” said Wingate. “Assuming you want to live.”

  “Don’t assume anything about me.”

  Wingate watched Cutter in the mirror lean back in the seat. He made no eye contact with Wingate, choosing to watch the countryside go by. In daylight, he looked younger than he had at the archives, where the overheads had given him a dead-white cast.

  “Is Renald alive?” Wingate asked.

  “For now.”

  “Why did you take him? You killed the others.”

  Now Cutter flicked him a look. “The others?”

  “The Fremonts. Brendan Givens.”

  “I don’t know who those people are.”

  “You’re kidding me. You didn’t kill the Fremonts? Slice up Brendan Givens in a hotel room in Toronto?”

  “No,” said Cutter, amused. “I think I would remember that.” He ran his tongue around inside his cheek. “Look, your colleague’s alive. No one’s killed anyone. And offing a cop is bad news. Although it makes you a hero in prison.”

  “If you ever get to prison.”

  Dead trees slashed past on either side. Wingate realized with a start that this was going to get him kicked off the force. He wasn’t cleared for duty and he was hostage in a cruiser without his badge or gun.

  He’d visited Yoshida knowing he was pushing it. But all he’d wanted to do was prove he was ready. If he did a good interview, moved the case forward, maybe they’d see he could work. Michael had been insisting it was going to take another year, but he could see in Hazel’s eyes that she wanted him back. In her eyes he was ready, and she was his only champion right now. And would continue to be, he hoped, realizing he needed at least one.

  He continued north on the 41 until Port Dundas was almost three hundred kilometres behind him. They’d crossed the border between Westmuir and Parry Sound. The autumnal changes were more advanced at this latitude. Many of the trees were bare already and the nostalgia of fall-in-progress had given way to the foreboding of the coming winter. Ice clung to the blasted granite sides of the highway, and the few fields carved out of the forest were denuded, empty. He considered the possibility that he was about to be murdered.

  After almost an hour of silence, Cutter spoke: “You know that thrill of horror you get when you realize the chicken you just ate was undercooked?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That feeling that you might have just caught your own death the way you catch a cold. Once, I had a kebab that was cool in the middle and I could taste the bleach.”

  “What do you want, Leon?”

  “I want to catch our man.”

  Cutter hadn’t put on a seat belt, as far as Wingate could tell. A sudden stop might give him control of the situation. But it might also get them both killed. He’d had his dance with death and gotten away. He wasn’t going to risk it a second time.

  “Did you give the order to someone to kill the Fremonts or to kill Givens?”

  “What case are you on, little detective?”

  “I’m not so sure now.”

  “Ascot knew what was in those fields. Ascot knew, but they didn’t report it. I waited fifty years to learn what happened to my friends, but instead of reporting their bones to the police, Ascot
built a golf course on top of them.”

  “Am I driving you north at gunpoint for a reason?”

  Cutter leaned forward suddenly, his head springing out to Wingate’s right, between the seats. “I want their bones! I want them to receive a proper burial. And I want the person who killed them identified.”

  “Whoever did it is dead.”

  “I know that.”

  “And the remains are evidence in an ongoing investigation.”

  “Pull over,” Cutter said sharply.

  “Where?”

  “Here! Pull over!”

  Wingate crossed a lane and got onto the shoulder. Cutter stepped out of the car, training the gun on him the whole time. The muzzle felt like a human eye. His neck prickled. Cutter leaned down to the window and gestured him out. Wingate struggled out of the driver’s seat and stood beside the car.

  “I’ve done almost all of your work for you,” Cutter said. “Now you have to carry it over the finish line.”

  “Why haven’t you reported what you know?”

  “We’re not the law. We’ve had half a century to work on what happened to our friends, but if I reported what I’d found? The police were an accessory! So were the morgues. Even some local politicians. No one would listen to me. I want you and your partner to make it stick. And if you don’t do it by Friday, I’m going to kill Melvin. Now give me the keys.”

  “The keys?”

  “I’m going back for my car. I left it in Dunneview. I just need you far away for a couple of hours. You can hitch back in your uniform.” He jiggled the end of the gun. Wingate handed over the keys. Cars had been going by in both directions for more than a minute now, but their drivers had been oblivious to what was happening on the shoulder as they zipped by faster than the speed limit. No OPS officer had passed in either direction. Never a cop when you need one.

  Cutter got into the cruiser and rolled down the window. “Good luck, buddy. See you soon.” He pulled out onto the road.

  A few minutes later, Wingate saw him on the other side of the median, driving south.

  ] 24 [

  1957

  On Christmas Day, still stuffed like a turkey with turkey, Hazel reluctantly set the table for lunch. She had tried to press-gang Alan into doing it, but he was enjoying his new Meccano set and she was happy to let him be. He’d never know what his true Christmas gift had been, the one she found in Toronto’s Chinatown. She could tell no one what she’d done; it had to be between herself and Carol’s parents. She felt certain that the Lims would not report her secret foray. Perhaps now she would become the sole conduit to their daughter – they would go through her until Hazel finally figured out a way to get Carol home. They would need her.