At that moment, city workers were using gas-powered blowers to scatter autumn leaves from the skirts of those few elm trees that remained. Otherwise, Two-Trees had the place to himself, so he walked toward the lake, deliberately stepping off the cobbled path. Another memory popped up: all of Halo County sitting on lawn chairs or beach towels, smacking blackflies against their necks, drinking legal soft drinks with illegal additives, watching fireworks launched from a boat in the middle of Steeper Lake.
If Two-Trees dumped all the things he hated about Halo County onto one pan, and all the things that brought him comfort on another, the two might balance each other out, but the scales would break under the weight.
His phone rang. He checked the number before answering.
“Hey,” he said.
“Where are you?” Bridget asked.
“I’m headed back to the hotel in a couple of minutes,” he said. “I’m at Pritchard Park. I figured it would be better if I came here alone.”
“What are you doing down there?”
“The local police picked up a few kids near here,” he explained. “They’d been formally charged with public intoxication—local custom, don’t even know why police bother anymore—but one of them was caught with a human skull.”
He wondered if all three punks were still in jail. If that were the case, and if they were lycanthropes, then their biological clocks were swiftly ticking toward their next cycles.
“Do I want to know what they were doing to the skull?” Bridget asked.
“Using it as a goblet.”
“For satanic rites?”
“Who knows? Anyhow, I thought I might be able to see if they’d left anything else behind.”
In the ’70s, there had been a dock stretching out partway across Steeper Lake, used most often as a jetty for canoes, but because of its rustic quality, because of the lake, the weeping willows, the sunset, and the old paper mill in the background, it was the place to get your wedding photos taken, so long as the photographer knew how to angle his camera just right and leave the hydroelectric dam out of the picture. In the ’80s, they added large signs that said “No Diving” and ruined all wedding photos for the next seven years. In the ’90s, they rebuilt it in time for the city’s sesquicentennial and even had the Governor General come out to help celebrate. After the Reid thing, they’d taken out the jetty completely and built a “historic covered bridge”, from which no one could swan dive into the currents of the Oxley Dam and bob up dead in Pouch Lake below.
“You know, in my high school days, I probably would have been a jungle punk myself,” he said to Bridget as he stepped onto what should have been a romantic dock. His footsteps echoed, as the bridge engineers had intended. “And this is where I’d go for a little anarchy.”
“So what do you expect to find out there?” she asked. “More punks or more skulls?”
“Maybe the rest of a body,” he said.
Facing east from the bridge, all he could see was Steeper Lake and the horseshoe-shaped Pritchard Park. Only the tops of the tallest apartment buildings rose over the trees. He turned west and took in Oxley Paper Mill and Pouch Lake. There had been a millwheel once, powered by the water flowing in rapids from one lake to the next. The lower lake was skirted in maples, pines, oaks, willows, and sumac, all at the height of their fall colours. He stopped there a moment and thought, It doesn’t look half so bad from up here.
He had good memories of bad trouble, lounging around the park, sharing a joint, and hiding out in that old fieldstone mill whenever cops came in sight. Once the rapids were dammed, the bottom two storeys flooded every spring, but there was always some way onto the top floors.
Sometimes Two-Trees marvelled at fate. There was no good reason why a kid like him should have been let into the OPP, let alone the RCMP later. He remembered the arrogance of the jungle punk in Palmer’s interrogation room. I guess we were better at talking ourselves out of trouble, back then, he thought.
“You still there?” Bridget asked.
“A little.”
“You have a theory?”
The bridge led to the western side of Steeper Lake, where a path lead north toward Prince Street and downtown Elmbury. South of the bridge, on the western lakeshore, were the fenced off ruins of the mill. His eyes watered with the need to sneeze.
“I’ve got one idea,” he said. “So far.”
“You need backup?”
“Not yet. But stick on the line and keep me company for a while. Convince me why it’s a good idea to keep the Padre in town.”
“I never said it was a good idea. But until we can get in touch with Harvey, Padre’s the best bad idea we’ve got.”
Two-Trees made some noncommittal but hopeful noises at that. Here, the rushing water over the spillway sounded like static, and Bridget complained about the quality of her reception. “Listen, there’s something else you can do with your time, if you’re interested,” he said.
“Speak!”
“See if you can find a Facebook profile for me, or any other social media outlets.”
“For who?”
“Something Laura Maurelli said—”
“Who?”
“Vice-principal at one of the local high schools,” Two-Trees said.
“Wait, you think we can find Sydney online? Dude, they’d have tried that by now.”
“What I want you to do, actually,” he said, “is see if you can find Laura Maurelli.”
“Wow, Two-Trees, really? You’ve been back for what, two days, and already you’re hooking up with old girlfriends?”
“Maurelli seems like the crusader type. She might have turned to other public options, if she thought the police were too slow.”
“Right. I’ll see if she reached out to her Facebook crowd. Maybe a local kid had a lead.”
“Or maybe another parent spoke up. I don’t know. Just . . . whatever you can find.”
“Right,” Bridget said. “Get on Facebook, find Laura Maurelli, see who wrote on her wall—parents, staff members . . . check out their Facebook friends—their own children, students, gaming friends . . . see if we can get a bead on Sydney’s cohort. Read what they’ve been posting about her.”
“It’s scary how much kids put out there in public,” Two-Trees said.
“Oof, don’t I know it.”
Against strict Wyrd policies, posing as Claire Bambridge’s long lost sister, Bridget maintained contact with her own children and grandchildren. She knew all too well what kids and adults foolishly posted online.
“At the very least, if she’s infected, we can start a new containment list,” Two-Trees said.
“Bloody hell . . . All right. Just don’t be out there too late, and don’t go into any dark corners.”
“Too late for that,” he said. He was already at the end of the bridge and off the beaten track. “You have the county map there?”
“Yeah—what the hell is all that noise?”
“Hydroelectric dam’s spillway,” he said. “Find it on the map. Go to the north-western edge of Steeper Lake. See where the two lakes join?”
“Hang on.” Bridget shuffled papers while Two-Trees pressed on into thicker weeds, following a well-trodden path.
The fence had been solidly built once, and it was plastered with No Trespassing signs, as if that would do any good. He pushed deeper into familiar territory, where the wind blew through the fall colours. The sun never quite reached the dirty floor, though it wasn’t exactly a forest. It was derelict ground with good overhead cover. He followed the chain link south, following the chutes and the spillway past the ruins of the mill. Even from a distance, between the choking weeds, he could see graffiti tags from three generations of trespassers. There wasn’t a pane of glass left, and not much of a roof either.
“Yeah, here it is,” she said. “What am I looking at?”
“Paper mill,” Two-Trees replied. “The place has been abandoned since the early ’80s, but it’s still a truant’s paradise.
”
He stepped over a very old, very abused-looking mattress. There were signs of regular campfires here, complete with fire stones, a charred aluminum cooking grill, and chewed up plastic bags half buried in the mud. There was a torn backpack, logs converted into benches, a yellow plastic soap dish, and the mottled remains of an old math textbook.
“And you think you’ll find a body inside the mill?” Bridget asked.
“Maybe,” he said. He stopped a step later. Police had taped off the area where the fence had been cut and bent over. “Actually . . . I think someone already has. Whoop—hang on. Someone’s coming.”
Two-Trees slipped behind some bushes and watched as lead detective Richard Palmer came skidding down the hill on his heel and stopped inside the personal space of another officer, pretending like he’d meant to do it.
“You still there?” Bridget asked.
“Never mind, I’ll ask Buckle if they found anything,” Two-Trees murmured.
“Buckle who?”
“I’ll explain it when I get there. You just get started on that Facebook angle.”
“Way ahead of you,” Bridget said, just as Detective Sergeant Richard Palmer looked up and Two-Trees turned away, pretending to be just another vagrant who thought it best to get out of The Man’s way. “You all right?” she asked. “You sound like you’ve got a mouthful of marbles.”
“It’s nothing,” Two-Trees said. “Just get cracking. Sooner I’m out of Halo County, the happier I’ll be.”
Chapter Sixteen
BRIDGET HAD TAKEN over the job of looking at the websites Michael Crow had written down, though she often had to try several times before she had the correct address. After printing countless articles from innumerable sites, using Two-Trees’ portable laser printer, she sat back, rubbing her eyes, yawned, and crossed her feet at the ankles before dropping them on Two-Trees’ lap. The printouts were scattered everywhere, some highlighted, some covered in point-form notes.
“Any luck on Facebook?” Two-Trees asked, as he stretched and cracked his back.
“Not much,” she said. “Lots of people saying that she ran away.”
“Adults or kids?” He absentmindedly massaged her smelly feet.
“Kids, mainly. Boys, mostly. I checked Maurelli’s friend list, but Sydney wasn’t on it.”
“Well, most vice-principals aren’t hip enough to befriend street kids.”
“Not publically, at least,” Bridget said.
“Any luck tracking down parents?”
Bridget sighed noisily and wiped her face. “Scary-few people made any comments at all. Maurelli posted her own kind of AMBER Alert, and a few people shared it without comment. Otherwise . . . I got dick all, my friend. God, I hope my own kids are more engaged than that. Anyhow, that’s the popular vote: she got tired of being bullied and ran away. It’s a possibility, dude. We have to consider that.”
He knew. The Mounties were routinely called in to assist with cross-provincial runaways and suspected kidnapping cases. Most of the runaways ended up in cities, on the streets, on friends’ couches, or in shelters. For most all of them, life was shit on the streets, but flaming hell at home.
“Are you still itching?” Bridget asked.
“Why?”
She stood. “Shirt off. You’ve been squirming like a bear against a tree.” He disrobed to the waist and she applied a coat of the cold ointment he’d bought that morning from the pharmacy.
“Weird though,” he said. “When I showed her one of my forensic reconstructions, she seemed to recognize one of the male figures.”
“Oh yeah? Which one?”
She finished applying the ointment, and he sat forward to pick through the papers. It took him a second to remember which one. He showed it to her, once he found it.
“Well shit,” Bridget said. “Hang on . . . hang on . . .” She rushed to the computer and clicked through a chain of friends’ lists until she found the picture she was looking for. She called up the profile. “Jayden Russell Brown.” She turned the computer and compared his reconstruction against the profile picture. It wasn’t exact, but the resemblance was remarkable. Bridget scrolled down, showing Two-Trees the pages of comments, telling Jayden to come home, reminding him that his family loved him, begging him to contact police and let someone know he was all right. “He went missing in April.”
“From where?”
“Langley, BC,” she said, her voice wavering, then she added, “I went looking through some of his so-called ‘friends’ and the comments on their own walls. Some said he ran away because he was being bullied about his weight. Some said he went down to Seattle for a concert and never came back. A few said he had a boyfriend online, and that he’d announced he was going down there to meet him.”
“But if this kid is from Langley, and he ended up dead here . . .”
Bridget raised an eyebrow. “Then we have to ask Ms. Vice-Principal why she recognized his face. We have a lead at last!” She smiled, clearly impressed. “So what else did you get?”
“Nothing so dramatic as that.” He made a mental note to let Buckle know about his reconstruction and about the missing boy from BC. “Catherine Anne Mission—Sydney’s mother . . .” Two-Trees read from the certificate Michael Crow had photocopied. “She married John Reid in March of 2001, at Elmbury Town Hall.”
She flopped into her chair. “So that means Sydney was five or six years old when her mother got married,” Bridget said. She was looking at one of the newspaper archives she’d printed, providing additional background on the victim and suspect in the Reid murder case. The article carried a wedding picture. Catherine Mission had been twenty-something at the time, and had crooked teeth, double chins, a yearbook smile, bugged out eyes, a bad haircut, and a neck tattoo. John Reid wasn’t much classier. He looked fat and mean. Two-Trees was disappointed to see John hadn’t been sporting either a Mohawk or a mullet. “You have a birth certificate?” Bridget asked.
“Not here, no. Why?”
“Just wondering if John Reid really was the father.”
“There’s room for doubt?” he asked. “I mean, look at them.”
She plucked another article from their scattered pile, this one from 2007, immediately following the Pritchard Park incident. In this reprint, the newspaper had included recent mug shots from both Reid brothers. John Reid had a fleshy, baggy face and an unready smile, but he and Sydney had the same eyes, mouth, hair, and nose. Luke Reid was fleshier and looked a little high at the time of his arrest, but otherwise, he was his brother’s twin. There wasn’t even a distinguishing mark between them, no scars to differentiate them, no unique squint. They both bore a likeness to the Padre, too, but only in the way uncles might resemble a nephew. In the photograph, it looked like John Reid had rapidly lost weight. His cheeks had fallen into jowls.
“Brother Luke could have been the father, for all anyone knows,” Bridget said.
“You read too many romance novels.”
“Soap operas. Evil twins twice a season, every network. Weird that we didn’t pick up either Sydney or Catherine. After Pritchard Park, you’d think we’d have quarantined the whole damned town.”
“I know,” Two-Trees said. “I don’t remember seeing them on the k/c/q list.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Dude, you’ve got a good memory, but not a photographic one. They could have been assigned to someone else. We can check Wyrd files. See why they were missed.” She tilted her head. “When did John get diagnosed? Do you remember?”
Two-Trees referred to his notes. “January 2006. Late stage pancreatic. Luke followed suit in October the same year.”
“And when did John and Catherine get divorced?”
He didn’t have it written down, so they both went rummaging through the scattered papers. Bridget found the article first.
“Divorce was filed in December of 2005,” she said. “From Vancouver. Huh . . . I wonder if there’s a connection between Sydney and the missing kid from Langley.”
>
“Maybe. Vancouver’s a big place, and so’s Langley. Anyhow, she probably wouldn’t have been in physical contact with the Reids after they’d started taking treatments from Dr. Grey,” Two-Trees said. “That’s why we left her and Sydney off the k/c/q list.”
She shrugged impulsively. “We must have assumed Sydney went to Vancouver with her mother. She could have stayed home with daddy.”
Two-Trees stared back dubiously. “John Reid has a rap sheet as long as my leg. Even dumb judges would know better than to award him custody.”
“Who said anything about custody?” she asked. “She’s already got a history of running away. What if she ditched Mommy-Dearest in Vancouver and hitched a ride back here?” She sat up. “I mean, obviously she came back at some point. Question is, how long has she been back—”
“If she ever left,” Two-Trees agreed, gloomily.
“And did her return overlap that time between John Reid’s infection and the Pritchard Park incident?” She clenched her fists as if celebrating a mighty victory as quietly as possible. Then her hands relaxed. “Except it still doesn’t line up.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“Second generation victims had a life expectancy between a year and a half and three years. She would have died in 2010.”
“Assuming nobody screamed, ‘Agh, bloody werewolf!’ and shot her dead before then.”
“I wonder where Brother Luke was during the separation and divorce? Did wife and brother-in-law ever hook up?” Bridget shivered. “What happens if you put a restraining order against one of a pair of identical twins? The order is against the father, John, but the person who shows up swears he’s Brother Luke and provides ID and everything—except that he really is Father John . . . See, this is why identical twins freak me out.” Two-Trees laughed but she was serious. “Only thing that freaks me out more is thinking about all the ways a father could infect his own daughter.” She stood up to grab another can of Coke from the twelve pack he’d picked up. The beer they’d save for later. She cracked the can open and drank better than half of it in one breath. “God, how’d we ever avert a global catastrophe?”
Helix: Plague of Ghouls Page 20