Missing Chldren

by Gerald Lynch

  For the first time in a long time I took Veronica’s warm hand as we heard the raw details reported: no blood, no bruising, no tearing — such words for a daughter’s body! — nothing, in fact.

  We actually said it together, we two proud atheists: “Thank God.”

  Veronica acted chirpy then, bustling about the room looking to pack things that weren’t there, saying we had to hurry back home to Owen, now thanking “the gods” for small favours.

  I lifted Shawn’s warm chin in my hand — remembered my examination of the arsenic-poisoned Marie LeBlanc — and looked into her flat green eyes. Mournful is the word for this ugly new world occupied now by my beautiful daughter with her head like a rained-on dandelion clock.

  She only mouthed the words to me, so as not to disturb her mother further: Nothing happened. Then jerked her chin out of my hand.

  It was laughably mad, I knew, to dream of restoring the past in the present and securing the future. Because I saw as clearly as my empty hand that my darling daughter’s spirit had shifted away — I actually felt its removal — and it would never return. And that maddened me like hell.

  She hopped down and found her running shoes. Veronica draped an arm around her shoulders and they just walked off like nothing really had happened.

  She was definitely hiding something from me. When the door closed behind them, I slammed my fist on the green leather table still bearing its protective paper, which had been scrunched and torn by my ten-year-old daughter’s bared body. Don’t tell me nothing happened!

  Chapter 13

  I decided mother and daughter needed some alone-time, so asked that the meeting with Detective Beldon be at the Lighthouse Bar & Grill. He was waiting outside the door and still cursing himself out for not having answered his cell earlier.

  I said, “What difference would it have made, Detective?”

  He looked me over, his irritation melting to bemusement. “What is it you wanted, Lorne?”

  Good question. I couldn’t remember. “Let’s get out of this heat and have a drink.”

  He pleaded that he’d been cooped up all day, said he needed a walk more than a drink, and a smoke.

  Reluctantly, I took him along Troutstream’s winding paths to Shoal Park, our old family park. We sat on a brown-painted cedar bench. From the thin yellow tin he picked a small cigar, which he inserted into his mouth and withdrew moistened. With practised thumb he flipped the lid of an old-style silver lighter, ratcheted its wheel and fired the cigar, clicked shut. He puffed deeply once to get it going and let the smoke drift from his nose in blue ribbons. The aroma was lovely, redolent of burning autumn leaves and wise dads in bulky burgundy cardigans.

  In the silence between us the small cigar dwindled to half an inch. He ground it out, gazed up into the trees.

  “Lovely place you’ve got here. Listen to that silence.”

  He actually listened. I followed his gaze up into the leaf-laden maples, which were showing heat fatigue, curling inward. It had been a hell of a summer and the heat didn’t look to be ending any time soon.

  “It’s far from pleasant valley here, Kevin. We have the sprawling regional detention centre to the south, as you know, and the Mann gravel quarry bordering us to the northeast. And at the end of the actual Troutstream further north, the sewage treatment facility. Wind blows from the north, you’ve got molecules of other people’s shit up your nose.”

  “Ah, well, no suburb is an island. I should be heading back soon, lots of paper work. What was it you wanted to talk about again?”

  My throat constricted. I felt my face flush and prayed he wouldn’t notice.

  “This isn’t your burden to shoulder alone, Lorne.”

  We sat so still that a crow alighted in the massive cedar sandbox right in front of us. It began tugging at a mostly buried wrapper. Up close, Troutstream’s crows are the size of roosters and this devil was keeping its beady black eye on me even as it worked at the hidden treasure. Just when it had dislodged what looked like a Golden Crunchie wrapper, an even larger crow came squawking down and tore the paper from its beak and flapped off with powerful wing strokes.

  I’m the least superstitious person I know, but the injustice in that performance of pecking order moved me unaccountably. I buried my face in my hands and shook silently.

  “I’m going to find him and kill him,” I managed through my covering hands. “He’s ruined everything.”

  I felt his fingers wrap my forearm, tighten, and he said, “Shit eventually gets up everybody’s nose, Lorne. The miracle is that the sickos don’t fuck with our orderly lives more often. If this is the worst of it, you’ll adjust and it won’t be so bad, in time. You’ve been violated, your entire family life, things will never be the same, but you already know that. What nobody knows is what’s going on inside Shawn. That’s your end of the continuing investigation, Dad. It’s either you or the grief counsellors. Leave the criminal investigation to me. Okay?”

  Unwilling to look at him, I spoke into my cupped palms: “Things had been going so well for us. No real problems to speak of. We’d been having fun together again. And now this.”

  “I won’t lie to you, Lorne, innocent fun’s over.”

  I managed, “What could be worse?”

  I heard him sigh, and he said, “You know the Market Slasher?”

  “Those were young hookers working the Market. I’m talking about my ten-year-old daughter! I’m gonna find the animal that did this and kill him!”

  He stared at me for a long while, to let me settle some. He took a noisy breath, slowly, as if he were filling up for a plunge. “Okay. Do you know anything about developments in the forensic sciences?”

  “What?… Yeah, that’s when the lab downtown matches etchings on bullet casings to the suspect’s gun barrel. I see it on TV all the time.”

  “Sure you do.” He looked too smug. “Only there’s forensic entomology now. Ever hear of that?”

  I wouldn’t be baited.

  “Guns and shell casings aren’t much involved in missing children cases. Maggots, now, they’re a different story. Those hungry little buggers grow at a reliable pace. And the stages of their development are tied to local climate conditions and can be quite specific even to very limited territories. That’s now one of the best ways of pinpointing the time of death, of ascertaining whether the body was moved, even how far.”

  “I get the point. We’re lucky Shawn’s returned safe and sound. But that’s not my point.”

  “I’ve been studying the subject in evening criminology courses at the University of Ottawa.”

  “This is about what’s been done to my family, and catching and punishing the animal who did it.”

  “Of course. That’s what we all want. As for little girls who’ve been abducted and raped before being murdered, we’ve found an investigative ally in pubic lice. You know, crabs. The louse will contain the rapist’s blood, no pun intended. And today’s juries get a hard-on for DNA evidence.”

  “That is some sense of humour you’ve got there, Detective,” I said through my teeth.

  “Okay, but I had to turn your crank to make my point. I believe I can say this to you, Lorne, and it’s strictly entre nous. But I’m going to find our abductor, I promise you that. I’m going to do it for two reasons that actually have little to do with Shawn’s unsettling experience and your grief, I freely confess. One, I need to know just what the hell our man is up to, abducting kids, dressing them up and taking pictures, releasing them unharmed. And two, as you joked yesterday, I do indeed want to make Homicide.”

  I closed my eyes. “Since you haven’t caught him yet, what makes you so sure you will now?”

  “Stupidly, I didn’t care as much before. In this business, with the things I see daily, comparatively harmless is comparatively harmless. The other kids weren’t missing anymore, no foul play. I was hopeful, ev
en confident, that Shawn would be showing up the same way. And I was expecting to be taken off your case and moved to the Major Crimes Unit immediately. They were feeling the heat on the Market Slasher and Homicide needed all the help they could get.”

  “What happened?”

  He stood and looked at me silently till I joined him and stood.

  “You know what happened. The Market Slasher was captured last night, not long before Dr. Foster — quite the night in sleepy Ottawa’s ByWard Market, eh?” He deflated, pinched his mouth and shook his head as he had when castigating himself over not having answered his cell. He talked more to himself than to me:

  “A big-time serial killer operating in my own backyard, national news, international, and there I was, still out looking for missing kids who weren’t missing any longer. I was so pissed about it, I made a stupid mistake downtown yesterday morning. I butted in while my staff sergeant, who already hated my guts anyway, was giving the Major Crimes superintendent his thoughts on the Slasher, and I blabbed sarcastically for all the whole room to hear: No way the guy’s some punk gangbanger, not the way those hookers are sliced-and-diced right on the street. Check every guy in Ottawa who’s had a tour in Kandahar or any other of those desert shitholes, and don’t forget the mercenaries. Knife-work like that was copied from those Taliban boys.

  “As we now know, the Slasher’s not long back from some independent work in Turkey. But the way my slack-jawed sergeant looked at me, then at our newly interested Super, then back and forth between us, I knew in my gut that my loud mouth had just killed my latest hope of reassignment. I tell you, Doctor, if something really good doesn’t happen for me, and soon, I’ll die in Missing Persons. I need to put our creep behind bars, and now.”

  “But the superintendent must have heard you and acted on what you said. They did catch the Slasher last night! They must have been watching guys who fit the profile you gave. Won’t you get some credit?”

  “No. Story of my life. Let’s go.”

  Instead of heading home, I decided to accompany him back to his car at the Lighthouse. He wouldn’t join me for a drink, so I had his as well.

  When I entered the kitchen, Veronica said evenly, “Shawn’s at Shoal Park with Jake and some friends. Maybe you should go get her. It’ll be dark soon. And Jake needs a bath.”

  “You let Shawn go out! There are reporters lurking everywhere, and who knows what… Look at me! What’s wrong with you?”

  She didn’t look. “Lots. Right now, you shouting at me. Are we going to keep Shawn indoors from now on, is that it? Do we want her to think there’s something wrong with her that has to be hidden away? That what happened was her fault? She has to talk with someone. She won’t open up to us. Jake could be a help there. But I don’t want her staying out any longer.”

  She was speaking clearly, but without affect.

  “I don’t know about Jake being a help to Shawn. And by the way, that’s the same prescription you had for Owen, the Dr. Phil talking cure. I just don’t want anything else bad happening to us, love.”

  “I’m talking about Shawn. Will you go get her or do I have to? Were you visiting Art Foster?”

  “Veronica, you are not making sense. I was, uh, consulting with Kevin.”

  “Sense?” She snorted lightly. “You’d better go. It’s getting dark. Or don’t, if you don’t want to. Jack’s not up to bathing Jake, who’s afraid of baths now.” Her voice was breaking, broke: “Won’t somebody help me?”

  That got me moving. I turned at the front door and shouted back, “Don’t you go anywhere! You’re experiencing post-traumatic stress! Let Jack look after his own kid and we’ll look after ours!”

  I hustled along the sidewalk and took the path back to Shoal Park. As I passed the schoolyard of Lampman Elementary, the outdoor lights came on in a pop and fizz of dim magenta glow, without much effect in the twilight. It remained dusky along the treed path between two rows of houses. No backyard lights were on and it got gloomier the deeper I went. The evening may still have been as warm as high summer, but the days had shortened already.

  The golden-lighted playground was soon in sight like an oasis in the dark when a yowl made my heart trip. A bad-luck black cat came into view about twenty feet along, heading to cross my path. It was slow-moving and low-lying, it waddled, had a white patch… Skunk. I froze. It might turn and see me, it might spray me, it might dash suddenly and bite me! Skunks are often rabid and supposedly you can tell from a nonchalant manner. I waited nervously. It passed slowly…across my path, on to the left and under a large patch of shimmering hoya leaves, which rustled and glimmered dimly green.

  There is something about the evening lighting of playgrounds that lends the space a golden aura. When the safety lights first come up, a dusky playground soon looks starkly different from its daytime appearance. And as the darkness deepens and the artificial light increases, the area transforms into something otherworldly. Shoal Park was now such a space, as silent as a brightly moonlit clearing in a woods, which in a way it was. The impression of a magically illuminated private space was enhanced because the playground, like so many of Troutstream’s backyards, was enclosed by a storybook high-cedar hedge with shadowy gated arbours. A secret garden.

  I picked out the children in the farthest corner. But the magical peace of the place had cast its spell on me, and rather than stopping and shouting for Shawn and Jake to come home, I moved onto the grass and shuffled toward them. The swing sets and slides and jungle gym had only a shadowy substance. I paused, some thirty feet distant, realizing in only mild shame that I was there to spy. I needed to hear Shawn talk.

  A girl startled me with a squawk like a peachick in the night. Another girl’s — Shawn’s? — voice scolded, Get your fat ass back here this instant, you stupid fucking retard! That couldn’t have been Shawn…could it? I’d not distinguished Jake among the children, but now I saw him huffing out of the darkness to my left and go thumping close by like some nocturnal buffalo.

  Shawn seemed to materialize from the dark hedge itself, an apparition of shining daughter. Her fair bouncing hair carried the light. Jake passed the group and began running another circle, leaning inwards, elbows tucked and pumping. As he approached me again he uplifted to the night sky a radiant face like light made flesh. That was a whole new Jake for me, out of the darkness like that, transfigured in the radiant playground doing the thing he did best — a child at play.

  I expect the booze and drugs had something to do with the vision, because that’s what it felt like, a vision of one ecstatically happy kid, Down’s be damned.

  The others remained in their tight group by a corner arbour…five…four…maybe six children of about Shawn’s age and size, which made it more difficult to distinguish them. Either they were slipping in and out through the arbour gateway or the strange lighting was making them disappear and reappear against the hedge. I strained even more to distinguish their speech:

  No…swear… Why would never… You better not…you’ll ruin it for everyone… Why says if we can’t…

  Wy, not Why. Silly kids’ talk, that was all.

  Mouth hanging speechless, Jake completed another circle where they stood. Huffing powerfully, he dwarfed the others like some tamed ogre. Shawn extended her arm fully and pointed at him, spoke clearly: “Remember, Jake, not even your dad, and especially your mom, if she ever comes back.” Two of the figures disappeared through the hedge. Then they reappeared, but now it seemed there were far more than I’d originally thought, eight…no, seven…ten? And a couple were bigger boys now, much taller than Shawn.

  Puffing Jake pointed at my approach and said something unintelligible. They all looked brightly toward me, and there were only five of them again, and no big boys.

  Shawn’s face changed first. “Da-ad! What are you doing here?”

  I stopped. “You and Jake have to come home now.” I didn’t turn and leave,
as normally I would have.

  Jake took off like a startled cat out of the playground and along the path. I’d never seen him run anything but circles. I was impressed by his straightaway speed and I called, “Wait for us, Jake.” But he didn’t.

  When I turned back, only Shawn was there. She walked towards me, somewhat regally, the nimbus of her hair absolutely fairy-like. She wouldn’t deign to acknowledge me further. She wouldn’t hurry, either. So I let her pass under my gaze and followed after.

  I said, “Who were all those kids?”

  “What?” She didn’t look back.

  “I counted at least eight at one time. And there were some big boys. Who were they, little lady?”

  Nothing.

  “Shawn, I’m dead serious now. What was going on there? I saw and heard some disturbing things back there. You shouldn’t even be out at this time. I mean, right after what happened. Who were those big boys? I want their names.”

  “Friends,” she tossed off. “We’re making a Wy Knots fan club and we’re not letting just anyone in.” She couldn’t help exciting herself as she proceeded, the normally chatty Shawn: “Not any of those big boys for sure. Or maybe just Pete Carswell. He’s nice. And they don’t want Jake to go, unless I really push because I’m president.”

  I grabbed her shoulder, more roughly than I’d intended, and spun her round. “Go? Go where? Who were you waiting for back there? You were expecting somebody else, weren’t you, when you saw it was me?”

  She looked surprised at first at the rough treatment, then quickly clammed up again, which only confirmed my suspicions. A cat cried in that baby-bashing way and Shawn leapt forward and threw her arms around me, pressing her face just under my chin. I cupped her head.

  “What’s going on, dear? That’s all I want to know. Who were those big boys? Why Pete Carswell? What’s so special about him? What’s been happening with you, sweetheart?”

  She pushed herself off and fixed me with one of her mother’s fed-up looks.