A Door in the River

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  “So some of the profits here go into your addiction-counselling programs?”

  “No,” said Bellecourt. “The province pays for that. Part of the original arrangement.”

  Hazel was shaking her head. “I’m sorry if this comes out the wrong way, but that’s a hell of a sweet deal.”

  “Well, it’s certainly better than being landless and homeless, I agree.”

  She decided it was time to take her leave. “You’ve both been most helpful,” she said. She exited through the cacophony to the rear doors and back into the fresh air.

  The back parking area was much like the front: big lots with high light standards. In the intervening fifteen minutes, night had fallen and the lamps cast giant pools of warm light over the asphalt. She wondered how much light there had been in the back of Eagle Smoke and Souvenir. Because here, there were dark zones where the circles of light did not meet. Perhaps something untoward could happen in scraps of darkness that would not be seen by others. Clearly it was time to pay a visit on her own to the smoke shop. There was nothing in the QBPS report that mentioned the presence of surveillance cameras, but maybe there was some footage of something. If she owned a smoke shop on the main road in the middle of an Indian reserve, she’d have surveillance cameras. Hazel walked quickly toward the rear of the property and stood at the edge of the lot. There was no one parked this far away from the casino. Who would bother? Beyond her was a riot of trees and scrub, the same forest that surrounded everything down here, including the smoke shop’s parking lot. Plenty of places for hives – no mystery why the cause of death had been so easy to settle on. She leaned her body in toward the trees and listened and thought, for a moment, she could hear a distant buzzing. Then, suddenly, she did, and it was coming from very close to her body. She startled back two huge steps and then slumped. It was her radio vibrating on her hip. She unhooked it. “Micallef,” she barked.

  “Hazel? It’s James. Where are you?”

  “I’m at the Five Nations Casino. Haven’t you left yet?”

  “I didn’t get a chance. Something’s happened to Cathy Wiest …”

  ] 9 [

  It took her thirty minutes to get to the emergency clinic in Kehoe Glenn. Wingate was waiting for her when she arrived.

  “Have you seen her? Is she okay?”

  “She’s okay,” he said quickly. They went down a short hallway. “She’s in a room now.”

  “So it was a Taser?”

  “I don’t know. The paramedic said she had two puncture wounds in her chest.”

  “Just punctures?”

  “Like the ones on her husband.”

  “Oh man,” Hazel said. “What the hell is going on here? Have you been able to talk to her?”

  “Not yet. I’ve told you everything I know.” He opened a door and Cathy Wiest was sitting up in a hospital bed with a white bandage wrapped around her skull.

  Hazel turned in the doorway. “Everything?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “And she was hit over the head with a rock or something.”

  “Good lord.” Hazel dragged a chair around to the side of the bed. “How are you feeling, Cathy?”

  “Oh, my head is just killing me.”

  “She has to stay overnight for the concussion watch.”

  “What happened?” Hazel asked.

  “I woke up in the bathroom. There was blood all over my blouse. And the door was closed …”

  “You told the paramedics it was a girl who attacked you? Did you know her?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think Henry knew her?”

  “I guess he must have.” Her voice was faint and querulous. “She killed him … didn’t she? With that … gun.”

  “I don’t know, Cathy. Tell me, did you see the gun?”

  “No. It happened very quickly.”

  “Did wires shoot out of it? Did you see any wires?”

  “I don’t know. She was standing there and next thing, I woke up in the bathroom.” Her eyes landed on Hazel’s and they were empty and haunted now. “You knew something, didn’t you? That’s why you wanted a second autopsy.”

  “I didn’t know anything, Cathy, honestly.”

  “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “I just … I was doing my job. I didn’t think I was right, but I had to look into it.”

  “Well, I guess you were right.” Hazel put her hand in Cathy’s. Cathy grasped it.

  “Can you describe her?”

  “She was dirty. Like she’d been crawling through fields.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Young. Twenty. Twenty-two. She had an accent.”

  “What kind of accent?”

  “I’m not sure. She didn’t say very much. Maybe Swedish. Or German. Her eyes were like an animal’s, like a raccoon in the street.”

  “Do you know how long you were in the bathroom?”

  “Over an hour. I woke up, I don’t know how long after she hit me, and she was still in the house … I heard her on the floor above. So I stayed where I was. She was throwing things around. And then she left and I stayed in the bathroom for another half-hour before I came out.”

  “Did you go upstairs?”

  “I stayed in the kitchen.”

  Wingate had gone out and now he returned with a doctor in a white smock. “I’m Dr. Morton,” he said. “How can I help you?”

  “I want you to discharge Mrs. Wiest.”

  “Oh,” he said. “She needs to stay under observation. She took quite a conk on her noggin.”

  “This woman is in danger of more than a concussion, Doctor. I’ll keep her safe. But if the person who did this to her is still in the area, you could have a situation on your hands here.”

  “Couldn’t you leave an officer with us? Or a couple?”

  She thought about that for a moment. Then decided against it. “I don’t think so.”

  Morton directed his attention to his patient. “Are you comfortable with this, Cathy?”

  “Where am I going?” she asked Hazel.

  “My house.”

  Cathy Wiest gave her doctor a searching look. He said it was up to her.

  “You’ll take Mrs. Wiest out to my house in Pember Lake and stay with her, please, Detective Constable Wingate?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Cathy, this is the key,” she said, decoupling one-half of her keychain from the other. “My mother is there. You remember Mayor Micallef?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s who it is, only she’s even more difficult now. Just go on in with James and there’s a guestroom on the second floor. Take a bath if you like, and try to rest. James’ll wake you every couple of hours if you fall asleep to make sure you’re okay.”

  “All right,” said Cathy, and now that everything had been arranged and there was nothing else to do, the energy drained from her body and the remaining colour vanished from her face.

  “And do I have permission to enter your house?” Hazel asked her.

  “Oh. Yes, of course.”

  Dr. Morton left to process her discharge and Cathy got gingerly out of the bed. Wingate left again to give her some privacy while she dressed.

  Hazel helped her get changed. “What did he do?” Cathy mumbled, as if to herself, and Hazel held the woman by the arm to allow her to get into her pants.

  “We don’t know anything yet, Cathy. Nothing. But we’re going to work it out. I promise you.” She got Cathy her shoes. “If I could get a sketch artist into the detachment in the next fifteen minutes or so …”

  “I don’t know how much I remember …”

  “Do you want to try? Before James takes you to my place?”

  She raised her eyes to Hazel. “Okay.”

  She got Cathy’s keys and put her into the car with Wingate. She told him to put Melanie on the sketch artist and get him in quickly to get a rendering of the girl. Then she drove out to the Wiest house and parked on the street in front of it. Its windows were completely dark exc
ept for a glow emanating through the windows on either side of the front door. It sat, a dark silhouette under the half-moon, on its patch of land and seemed totally devoid of life.

  Hazel tested both the front and back doors and they were locked. One of Cathy’s keys worked in the back door, and Hazel went in quietly and listened. It sounded like the house was empty. She flipped a switch and the kitchen came to light.

  The table was littered with tissues beside a vase of flowers. Hazel closed the outer door and stepped into the house. A bulb buzzed overhead in the otherwise silent room. The darkly coloured flowers – tulips – were closed tightly for the night. There were similar vases on tables throughout the main floor, a total of eight in all. So after she’d swabbed down the house, Cathy Wiest had decided to anoint and fumigate it. She must had every tulip in Westmuir County.

  The kitchen was otherwise clean and there was nothing out of place on the rest of the main floor. The inexpensively furnished living room yielded nothing of interest. Their television must have been twenty years old: it had a power knob that you had to pull out and a dial with the UHF channels marked on it. This was a man who could easily have hooked up his own pirate cable or satellite but never had. The fireplace was more up-to-date than the electronics in the house. All of it spoke of a marriage where conversation was more important than sitcoms or sports: these were people who found each other interesting, for whom being distracted together was not nearly as desirable as simply being together. Hazel began to feel a note of grief creep into her thoughts as she continued to look around. To judge by the state of the house, and everything people said about Henry, this had been a happy place. It would never be one again.

  She went to the bottom of the stairs quietly and turned on the light. The drawer from the hall table was pulled out and its contents scattered on the floor. She saw the bank packet leaning against the moulding beside the dining room entrance. There was still cash in it: she counted it out. Three thousand. Someone had taken twenty-five hundred and left the rest behind? So maybe it wasn’t about money. Or maybe that was all the girl was owed by him. For what? Drugs? A sexual service? How wild was Henry Wiest? And who was this girl who took only half the money?

  Now Hazel realized there was a sound here, hard to place – it was coming from behind one of the doors upstairs. She pushed the cash down into a pocket and climbed the stairs with her gun drawn. The noise was coming from behind a door in the hallway to her right. She stopped and controlled her breathing, holding tight to the newel post. It sounded like someone was flipping paper. But anyone who was in this house had already heard her walking through it, and that meant they intended to finish their business no matter what danger it put them in. Which meant, also, that they were going to be prepared to defend themselves. There was a metallic sound from behind the door: someone fiddling with a lock or sliding hanging file folders along their railings. She crept toward the closed door, gritting her teeth, then stood to the side of it, her heart squeezing anxiously. “Police!” she called, her firearm up close beside her cheek. “Open this door and come out hands in front! If you have a weapon, throw it out into the hallway before you!”

  The sounds continued, more frantically now. She didn’t know if there was a window in the room, but she suspected there was, and it occurred to her that it might be smarter to rush out of the house and wait on the lawn for whomever it was to jump down. But to judge from the sounds within, confusion reigned behind the door and Hazel judged that her moment had arrived. She turned her hip and kicked the door in. It smashed against the wall inside the darkened room and she heard a high-pitched cry and the sound of paper being torn. She stood in the doorway with her gun out in front of her. “Don’t move! I will shoot!”

  Now there was silence, and she could smell the scent of ammonia. She kept her gun out in front of herself, reached to the side of the door, along the wall, and flipped the light switch. A cloud of white feathers was settling on the floor in front of her. Standing on a pedestal at a height of four feet was a dumbstruck white cockatoo in a cage. It was huddling in the farthest corner looking like it was having a heart attack, its yellow comb plastered down tight to its skull. Hazel stood down and holstered her weapon. “Good god,” she said, and the bird’s black eyes leapt in its head in terrified misery. It spread its wings: a slow, helpless movement, and then closed them up against its body in an effort to get as small as possible. The paper at the bottom of its cage was torn into ragged strips.

  “It’s okay,” said Hazel, breathing deliberately, slowing her heartbeat down. She began looking around the room with more focus now and saw that it had been turned upside down. Books and paper were scattered everywhere. “Just a little misunderstanding. I won’t harm you, birdie.” The creature opened its beak in a wide, tremulous movement, as if to squawk, but no sound came out. There was a puddle on the floor at the base of the pedestal and she noticed the bird had upended its little tin cup of water that normally hung from the bars. She approached the cage and gently unlatched the little door, speaking softly to the mutely squawking bird the whole time. She took the tin cup out, closed the cage, and retreated into the hall.

  The bathroom was through the master bedroom, which was empty and silent with bare bedside tables beside the perfectly made bed. A couple of the drawers were standing open. She looked inside them briefly, but if anything was missing from them, she couldn’t tell. She filled the bird’s water from the sink. It was the least she could do. She stood and looked at herself in the mirror. Her pupils were tiny, and Hazel stood for a moment studying herself. Was her face thinner now than it had been before the summer? One of the side effects of Percocet addiction is edema and she’d gotten used to the sight of loose flesh in her cheeks and along her chinline. Now it was gone. It had been three and a half months since she’d had a painkiller and now she could see her face again. A simple physiological change, but it hit her like a revelation. Even more than the cessation of withdrawal symptoms and the return of normal, bearable pain, this spoke to her complete escape from addiction. She was looking in the mirror and seeing her actual self again.

  But this wasn’t the place for a revelation. She corrected her drift and opened the medicine cabinet door and looked in on the hair products and razors, and on the top shelf there was an array of orange pill bottles. One of the pill vials contained a whole whack of OxyContins. Someone’d had an enthusiastic GP. She looked at the label, but the pills had been transferred from some other bottle: the label on this one was for Tylenol 3. She imagined that Henry Wiest had been no stranger to pain. She was sure there were still at least thirty pills in the bottle, but it was impossible to know when they’d been poured in here. Even so, thirty didn’t sound like a problem. She’d get a month’s worth, easy, every time Pass wrote her a prescription for her back. There was also a tiny ziplock bag of pot behind a can of shaving cream. Four small buds inside, maybe an eighth. More people smoked pot casually than you could imagine and it was less suspicious than the Oxys. Westmuir was overrun with pot, increasingly potent varieties, too, but there was no violence over it and the most harm stoned people ever did was rewatch Jim Carrey movies. If Henry Wiest had wanted pot, he wouldn’t have had to go to Queesik for it, she was pretty sure of that. She looked at the other bottles. There was an unfinished prescription for erythromycin dating to 2002, another vial containing a few Valium, and a fourth bottle that was half-full of the antidepressant citalopram. The prescription was made out to Henry Wiest and the label specified that there were four refills remaining. She studied the vial. The prescription was current. She replaced the bottle and closed the cabinet.

  Back in the bird’s room, the cockatoo was still huddled in the corner of its cage. Hazel opened the door to the cage and replaced the water cup. The bird watched her with huge eyes.

  This was the room that had been ransacked, although there were those drawers in the bedroom as well. The office had been torn apart. It was hard to imagine how to start to look for what might be missing from the r
oom. The drawers were emptied out and tossed to the sides, whole shelves of books had been pulled down. Hazel crouched and started looking through the papers. These were innocuous files: car ownership papers, telephone bills, warranties. Old banking accounts with wads of elastic-bound cheques bulging out of them. What had the girl been looking for?

  She returned to her cruiser and called in. “They had a bird,” she said to Wingate.

  “What?”

  “There was a bird in a cage. In the office.”

  “And what else?”

  “A big fucking mess. She was looking for something.”

  “Did she find it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  ] 10 [

  Thursday, August 11, morning

  Radio cars had been out all night sweeping the highways and rural roads of Westmuir, looking for the girl in the sketch artist’s rendering. She had a high forehead and large, intelligent, light-blue eyes. An average mouth, rendered expressionless by the artist, lips closed, and a tapering, rounded chin. Her long brown hair had been parted in the middle, curving tightly against her skull and pulled back. If not for the state of the girl when Cathy Wiest saw her, she would probably have been quite beautiful. In the drawing, she looked eighteen to twenty, and when Hazel saw it, she remarked to herself how the girl looked confident, engaged, and withdrawn all at once. It was not an unusual face for a girl of her age; Hazel imagined she would be able to slip in and out of the world at will. She was going to have to show herself if they were going to catch her.

  Detachments in Fort Leonard and Telegraph Heights had been activated and a total of eighteen cars searched until sunrise for signs of a young woman armed with a Taser-like weapon. It had been bold to knock on a door, maybe she would do it again. But there were no sightings of her, and she did not reappear on any doorsteps that would bring her to their attention again.

  They kept two cars at each detachment dedicated to the search and put out an APB with a description of the girl and the sketch that had been made of her.