When the Flood Falls

by J. E. Barnard

  Jan sat down quite suddenly.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The paramedics insisted on giving Lacey a stretcher ride up the few stairs to the parking lot. Their procession came out in the warm June afternoon to the sort of scene she’d usually seen from the active angle: a pandemonium of police and paramedic lights and enough superfluous passersby to give the show a circus flavour. Too bad the blood wasn’t a show-biz effect. She was tucked and strapped in enough that her bloody T-shirt didn’t show, but some of those raised cellphones were surely recording her bloodied face and matted hair for YouTube, or for possible sale to the evening news. As she was rolled to a stop by the rear of the ambulance, she saw she wasn’t the day’s only casualty. Jan Brenner lay on a second stretcher, covered with a blanket.

  “Jan! What happened to you?” That much breathing hurt, but not as much as it had a few minutes ago. Lying still was heavenly.

  Jan opened her eyes, squinting in the sunlight. “Might have swooned a bit when I heard you were alive. I was afraid he’d kill you before we found you. He killed Jarrad, you know. What happened?”

  “I fell for a stupid hockey trick.” Lacey reached out slowly with her bloody hand to squeeze Jan’s shoulder. “Thank you for sending them in. Whoever yelled my name saved my life. Another minute in that sink and I’d have been a goner.”

  “Least we could do for a pal,” Jan murmured. “What sink?”

  “The coffin-sized one in the clay room. He tried to drown me.” Lacey couldn’t turn her head far enough to see the muddy grey-brown water, so much lower than it had been, but she could hear it. “I guess he intended to drop me … in the … river. Like … the car.” A sob ripped up through her ribs.

  Jan’s hand crept out of the blanket and pressed cold fingers to hers. “It’s okay. It didn’t happen. No river. It’s okay.”

  The paramedic got between them, flashing his little light into Lacey’s eyes, asking her name, giving her the whole head injury rundown she had pretty much memorized in Dee’s hospital room. The routine was something to focus on, take her away from the tearing pain in her chest.

  “If you pinch me for my reflexes,” she said, as firmly as she could without taking a deep breath, “I’ll kick you really hard.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The paramedic wrote a number on his little chart. “You’re awake, responsive, and not garbling your words. Those are all good signs. Any more visual disorientation?”

  Just a blur from more welling tears. Lacey blinked them away. What was with her, crying over a few cracked ribs and a concussion? She’d felt worse any day of her six months’ RCMP training and at least twice a year ever since. Soft, that’s what she was getting. All this civilian living. Not that it had been noticeably more mellow so far. Lying out here in the sunshine — this was peaceful. She could take a nap right here, except that the paramedic was still talking.

  “What?”

  “I said, we’re going to take you into Calgary, get you stitched and wrapped. They’ll probably keep you overnight for observation.”

  “Oh great. They’ll come around and flash lights in my eyeballs every half hour.”

  “I see you know the drill. Let’s get you loaded up.”

  “Wait. Jan?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Did they get Mick?”

  “They have him.” Jan smiled. “Don’t worry about anything. I’ll send Rob to the hospital with clean clothes.”

  Chapter Fifty

  Lacey woke, still in hospital. Her first thought was to get to Dee. They hadn’t let her go visiting yesterday, just sewn her up, washed her, and tucked her into a clean hospital gown and then into bed. She didn’t remember the flashlight-and-questions routine waking her more than twice. Was that a good sign?

  She tested all her limbs. Everything that should move moved, though under protest. Apart from a great wad of gauze on her head and a hundred miles of strapping around her ribcage, she seemed okay. The rest was just bruises and minor punctures from the rough cart. Her hands were stained with disinfectant.

  Breakfast came and went, doctors and nurses, too. The morning crawled by. Rob showed up, bearing not only clothes, but also her toiletry kit. He helped her sit up, got her to the bathroom, undid her gown ties while holding the garment discreetly together over her bare butt, and sat himself down on a chair right outside the door.

  “Don’t lock it,” he warned. “I want to be able to leap to your rescue if I hear a crash. And don’t scream when you look in the mirror.”

  Of course she had to look then, propping herself on the sink ledge with both hands, wincing from the splinter holes in her palms. She was missing some hair around the gauze on her temple. A ring of swollen purple spread from it to include her eye, half her cheek and as much of her ear as she could see through the netting that kept the whole disaster together. If she had spent yesterday brawling with bikers, she wouldn’t have looked any worse. She could see why Rob had yelled for help when he’d found her, her head slick with blood, her T-shirt torn, and every inch of visible skin bloody, bruised, or filthy. Although the nurses had cleaned her up already, her skin felt sticky. Or maybe it was the memory of the blood and pain. She dropped the gown and began gingerly to wash everything she could reach without putting any twist on her damaged torso.

  By the time she was dressed, Marie and Tom were waiting by her bed. Tom said, “Wayne told me to say you shouldn’t worry about finishing the museum job right away.”

  “Or ever?”

  “No, he means come back to work when you’re ready.”

  “Really? I expected every day to be told to go.”

  Tom fidgeted. “That’s just his way. Doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Yes, it does, Tom. Tell me.”

  “Okay, have it your way. He figured you for a quitter because you left the Force when you could have stayed on. After I gave him the rundown last night, he said, ‘Anybody who’s half drowned, concussed, has broken ribs, is tied to a cart, and still takes down the suspect is no slacker.’ So you’re good with Wayne.”

  “Next time, I’ll try to get beat up on my way to the interview.” Lacey tried to keep the smile off her face, mainly because it hurt. She had a job waiting. The hospital had accepted her B.C. health card without a blink. She had a home at Dee’s for now, if she could struggle up that long staircase. Too bad Jake hadn’t gone ahead with his elevator. “Can we go see Dee?”

  “Have to wait for your official release.”

  The nurse bustled in, interrupting Rob’s bare-bones account of the events immediately following Mick’s arrest. She whipped through her discharge routine and loaded Lacey into a wheelchair.

  “I’ll drive,” said Tom.

  When they arrived in Dee’s room, Jan and Terry were already there, the former slumped in a wheelchair. “Are you worse?” asked Lacey at the same time as Jan said, “You’re looking better.” They both laughed.

  “Thanks,” said Lacey. “You’re about the only person who’d think so. Why the chair?”

  “I’ve resisted for years. But I really wanted to be here this morning, to see Dee and drive home with you. There’s no way I’d make it through all these miles of corridor, so they snagged me a chair from the lobby.”

  “You don’t fool me,” said Dee from her pillow. “You knew Lacey would get one and you had to compete.”

  Jan grinned. “I feel surprisingly okay not walking, though how I’ll get up to Elbow Falls to throw a coin in, I don’t know.” At Lacey’s puzzled look, she added, “It’s a thank-you to the river kind of thing. Since it didn’t destroy the town this time. I’ll show you.”

  Dee nodded. “Throw one for me, too. And now that Lacey’s here, can someone please tell me how it all went down yesterday?”

  Rob dived in. “So, the part Lacey doesn’t know: it was Jan who sounded the alarm over Mick being in the museum with her. We all thought h
e was too sick at the gala to have left his box, plus it was well known that he adored Jarrad. So naturally we didn’t think of him as dangerous. But Jarrad’s pet phrase, the one Chris quoted all the time, about pulling a dance on someone, or doing a dance —”

  “He used it with Mick, too,” said Lacey without thinking. Tom coughed. Dee waved a warning. She stumbled, backtracking. “I accidentally recorded a conversation Mick and Jarrad had last week. Back then I suspected Neil, and what they said meant nothing to me. Later it seemed like Jarrad was a threat to Camille, not to Mick. I never suspected Mick of anything until it was too late.”

  Terry looked at her curiously. “Will the recording be evidence against him?”

  “Gone now,” said Lacey, and saw Dee relax. “Mick took it yesterday. It’s probably in the river.”

  Tom stepped in. “It wouldn’t likely be admissible evidence, anyway.” And that neatly closed the subject of Jake’s illicit intercept. “Go on, Rob.”

  “Right. Well, after her morning of reviewing video footage, Jan was flat on her back with her brain gone begging, muttering variations on the theme of dance. I swear her head is a repository for more disconnected information than Wikipedia is. Eventually she sat up and said, ‘Dance? Dants. Mike Danton.’ She showed us the video that showed Mick conspicuously missing from his box, ordered us all down to the museum, and the rest is, if not history, then certainly becoming a local legend as we sit here.”

  Lacey reached for Jan’s hand. “Great work!”

  Jan turned red. “What else are friends for?”

  “Great work,” Tom echoed, and shook Jan’s other hand. “You saved one of my best friends. What I don’t understand, McCrae, is how he got the better of you. The guy’s a runt. And sick.”

  “A pacemaker.” Marie shook her head. “If you’d asked me, Lacey, I could have told you the number one problem with pacemakers is that the recipient feels so much better with blood finally pumping again that they overdo it. His symptoms were from doing far too much hard physical work, hauling bodies and pushing cars and whatever else. Not because he was in danger of heart failure.”

  “He wasn’t stupid, that’s for sure,” said Lacey. “I expected him to hit me with his little stick and was watching the top end very carefully. Then the bottom end flipped up between my ankles and I went down.”

  “But you already knew he was the Iago of the piece?” Rob gazed at her wonderingly.

  “He gave himself away talking about the elevator.”

  Jan lifted her eyes from Dee’s face. “I still don’t quite believe that Mick killed Jarrad. I’d have sworn he loved that kid more than anything.”

  “Not wisely, but too well,” said Rob, and looked at Tom. “Am I right?”

  Tom nodded. “The investigating officer got on the phone with Jarrad’s team psychologists yesterday. They had already referred him to a specialist in sexual abuse. It’s also clear now that Mick only took up with Camille after questions were raised about Jarrad living with him.”

  “Oh,” said Jan. “And then Mick found out he was getting the Order of Canada.”

  “He was?” Lacey winced at the pain of suddenly turning her head.

  “Uh-huh. Jake announced it at his Finals party. But it’s not the kind of news that comes on weekends. Mick would have heard earlier in the week. And the Order nomination would be dead in the water if even a rumour of child molestation surfaced.”

  Terry shook his head. “A lifetime of work for hockey down the drain over one mistake.”

  The room went silent, or maybe it was the roaring in Lacey’s ears that seemed to go on forever. A man excusing another man’s violence. She’d heard it so often from Dan, from others on her shift and his, from the higher-ups. She wanted to yell at Terry, set the record straight. How Mick had violated Jarrad’s trust as well as his body, how he’d tricked Camille into marriage to cover his ass. That wasn’t one mistake. That was a lifetime of choices. But if she yelled, if she told off Terry, she’d be alienating the people in this room who were his friends. People Dee needed very much right now. Was silence always the price she would pay for being accepted?

  Rob coughed. “It’s not one mistake, old man. He took gross advantage of his position of power over a vulnerable kid. Who knows how long it went on for, or if he’d done the same to other youngsters? He was destroying Jarrad long before he murdered him.”

  Terry was already turning red when Jan added, “And he married Camille under false pretenses, as surely as if he’d used a fake name. I wonder when she found out about him and Jarrad. She may be the town bitch now, but she wasn’t like that when they first moved here. Something hardened her. And maybe I was wrong about her reasons for sticking close to Jarrad. Maybe she was trying to protect him once she realized.”

  Relief surprised Lacey into a deep, painful sigh. She didn’t have to choose this time. Instead, she watched the others’ faces. They were nodding; those aspects of Mick’s deeds hadn’t escaped anyone but Terry, and he eventually nodded, too. If only Jarrad had gone public sooner, he’d have found support here. From what was on that recording, Mick had kept buying him off with cars, clothes, and promises of help he never intended to fulfill. Was it desperation that had sent Jarrad speeding out of Mick’s back lane that January night, killing Duke and injuring Dee?

  One other thing she hadn’t figured out. “How did Mick get Jarrad behind that rack?”

  “He sent the kid back there to sign his poster,” said Tom. “A fine-point marker had rolled under an adjacent rack. It had Jarrad’s fingerprints on it.”

  Simplest thing in the world. Lacey could see it all: Mick intercepting Jarrad as he came off stage, congratulating him on his performance, telling him his poster needed autographing if he had a minute. Whether the rack killed him outright or not, Mick had calculated that nobody would go down to that level all weekend. If he’d intended to move the body into the river, he was foiled by Lacey’s locking the vault when she recoded the elevator after the gala. If she had checked the vault itself, would she have found Jarrad still alive? She swallowed. No. Tom had said he’d died quickly, his chest wall crushed. To be certain, though, she would ask him again when she got him alone. No sense sharing that nightmare with people who had known him.

  Rob shuddered. “No wonder old Mick was in extremis when I found him in the theatre box. He’d just killed the kid he had loved and nurtured for ten years. He’d probably convinced himself it was mutual, or even that Jarrad seduced him first.”

  “If he’d just kept his head,” Tom said, “and done nothing after leaving the vault, he might have got away with it. Suspicion would have centred on his wife, even if she never came to trial.”

  “Almost makes me feel sorry for Camille,” said Dee. “Anybody know how she’s holding up?”

  “Fine, I’d say.” Terry’s lip curled. “Jake invited her to stay with him until the media stops camping on her doorstep. Wanna bet she’ll be the fourth?”

  Jan groaned. “Please, no. Even he couldn’t be that blind.”

  Shaking off her vision of Jarrad’s puffy face behind the rack, Lacey forced a smile. “Five bucks says she’s still there at Christmas. You said yourself, the worse a woman is, the better Jake likes her.”

  “Yeah, well,” said Jan, “Camille may be a bitch and a tramp, but she’s not a liar. She told Mick right in front of me that she didn’t believe his much-flaunted chest pains were serious, and she was right. If he hadn’t been spending his spare time murdering people, pushing cars into the river, and rushing up to burgle Dee’s house every second day, his pacemaker would have been fine.”

  “I’m starting to think he didn’t have a heart,” Lacey said. “If you’d heard him trying to pass the buck, first to his old friend and then to his wife … I’ll never believe in sports ethics again.” She groaned. “Ouch, my ribs. I need rest. Hope I can bend far enough to reach into your freezer, Dee.”
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br />   “No worries on that score,” said Terry. “You’re going home with Rob as babysitter, and Jake’s cook will send down meals daily, fit for a woman who can’t chew, but needs red meat to rebuild. We’ll have you ready to go rafting before the summer’s out.” He stood up “Rob, bring the van to the front doors, would you?”

  Rob nodded. “We laid the last seat flat for Jan. Lacey, will you want flat or merely a steep recline?”

  “Recline,” said Tom. “She’s done in ribs before and couldn’t lie flat for the first week. We’ll wheel you out, McCrae.”

  The cluster of visitors moved out to the hallway, leaving Lacey alone with Dee for a moment. She squeezed her friend’s hand. “Guess I won’t get back to see you for a couple of days. Sorry about that. And I’m really sorry I got so focused on Neil that I didn’t spot the real threat before Mick got to you.”

  Dee smiled sleepily. “Don’t worry about that. You’ve had a lot on your plate. And at least now we’ll have plenty of quiet evenings together to thrash out our miserable divorces. Two out of three’s not bad.”

  “Two out of three?”

  “When you moved to Calgary, you were divorcing, jobless, and homeless. Now you have a secure job and a home, for as long as you’ll stay. Nothing I can do about the divorced part, but I’m really glad you weren’t off having a fling with some hockey stud while I was getting run over in a ditch.”

  “I don’t have the stomach for the hockey crowd. All that money, and the power the team owners and agents and coaches have over those young men. It’s just asking for trouble.”

  “Not all of them are like Mick, thankfully. Sport does a lot more good than harm.” Dee yawned. “I feel so calm now. It’s like a flood washed all the hidden dirt to the surface, yours and mine, Jake’s, Mick’s. Now we can shovel it out and move on with a clean floor. Or some of us can. Say thanks when you throw that coin into the falls.”

  “I’m just glad the water’s gone down.” It would take Lacey a lot more than shovelling or wishing to clean up the mess from her marriage. She realized Dee was drifting off again and reached out one hand to smooth the blanket. “Let’s have a nice, gentle float for a while, okay?”