A Door in the River

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  “Am I allowed to go back to sleep?”

  “Not yet.”

  Her mother blinked slowly and Hazel told her what had happened in the last few days. Wingate’s injuries. The reappearance of Ray Greene. Willan laying down the law. Her long reign as interim CO was over. Emily had been summarily turfed in her fourth term as mayor, by a blinkered town council. Worse than what Hazel was going through now, but it was a commonality, and Hazel had lately been having the instinct to seek out as much connection with her mother as possible. And she’d appreciate her daughter turning to her …

  “Well, now we can both curl up and die,” her mother said. “You want me to move over?” Hazel laughed. “What’re you chuckling at?”

  “I thought maybe you’d pat my head and tell me everything’s going to be okay.”

  “I’ve never told you everything was going to be okay. In fact, if I recall, I’ve spent most of my life warning you that things go to pieces as a matter of routine. How come you haven’t learned that yet?”

  “I know it in my work life. I just thought …”

  “You thought that if you could convince me I still have work to do as your mother, I wouldn’t die yet?”

  Hazel’s smile faltered. “Well, when you put it like that …”

  “I’ll take my medicine, Hazel,” her mother said. “If you’ll promise not to make both our lives impossible when it’s time to make important decisions.”

  “Gary says you can live with myeloma for years.”

  “But not forever.”

  “No,” said Hazel. Emily swivelled her body on the mattress and slipped her frail feet out. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to the hospital.”

  “You don’t have to take me that seriously.”

  “No, dummy, I want to see James. Get me my grey slacks and something warm.”

  “Oh …”

  “Your timing stinks, though. I was just skiing with your father in New York.”

  “Really.”

  “Ellicotteville, 1941. Two years before you were born.”

  “Simpler times.”

  Hazel got her mother’s clothes out and told her she’d make some tea and then they’d go. But for herself, she didn’t want any tea. She went back down the stairs and got a half-full bottle of J&B out of the cupboard and sat in the rocking chair with it. She listened to her mother in the bathroom and she took one good glug out of the bottle and then another. Then she put the cap back on and put the bottle away. She filled the kettle for her mother and then went back out into the living room to wait. The Weather Channel was on silently – her mother only muted it when she napped, but she couldn’t be bothered to turn it off. Looking at the weather was perhaps a sign that the old bint was planning on continuing with life, pointlessness and all. Hazel stared at the screen. Weather systems were soundlessly pouring sideways across the province, forming and reforming like fog. Rain was coming from the Soo, but it was two days distant.

  Her mother was taking the stairs slowly. “Every system in this body is shorting out but my hearing,” she said. “And there’s no mistaking the crack of the cap on a whiskey bottle.”

  Hazel turned the kettle off.

  ] 38 [

  Wednesday, August 17, afternoon

  Over the Tuesday and into the Wednesday, as Katrina Volkov began to recover from her ordeal, the heartbreaking and sickening details of the case began to come to light. Volkov knew of a total of five girls, but the cramped history of the place suggested the operation had begun three years earlier. The story came down as oral tradition – from the girls who had once been there to the ones who were still alive. Two women Volkov had personally known had died before Kitty’s escape, and she had thought Kitty was dead as well. Now she was the only witness to a crime so horrifying that media from as far away as Miami were waiting in the parking lot of Mayfair General, hoping to get a word with somebody, anybody. Deliverymen were being handed wads of cash. LeJeune had dispatched every free body she had to the hospital on the Friday morning and her uniforms took up positions every thirty metres around Mayfair General.

  Friday afternoon, a Russian-speaking officer was bussed up from Toronto, in case he was needed. But Katrina’s English was good: she put her captivity at seven months. She’d been there long enough to learn English.

  They connected her to her husband in Elizavetgrad.

  “She is saying she was not in school,” said the interpreter.

  They left her alone, and let her rest. They had as clear a picture of what had happened under that little grove of trees as they would ever get. The last piece of information Hazel had really wanted had come out as well: Volkov had given Larysa’s last name as Kirilenko.

  The OPS and the QBPS had each sent a forensic team into those underground rooms on Wednesday afternoon. The two forces worked together. They’d found a basement that had been lowered and enlarged, like a giant tomb. There was a body there; later it was determined that this was the Ronald Plaskett that Wingate had earlier identified. He’d been shot dead. A long white wall with four doors in it ran against the longest wall. Each door had opened on a tiny eight-by-four “room,” with a dirt floor and at least one dirt wall, the one at their backs. Most of the chambers had a foam mattress and a blanket or two. The heavy door still stood in the north wall of the crushed room beyond it.

  Volkov’s stories filled the space with suffering bodies and whispering voices. The rooms had been freezing cold, even in the summer, and they discovered that it was warmer sleeping on the dirt itself, especially if you could loosen it up a bit. You could also loosen the dirt in the back walls and there were sometimes bits of sharp rock that were good for digging with. But at this depth underground, digging through the dirt with a little stone was like trying to scrape a hole in the sidewalk with your fingernail. “We make a broken telephone, you know? Before I am taken away from my home, in that place, the girls before us make a system for talking. They have make small holes in the dirt at the end of the wall, where the wall touches. Always, you make these holes filled with dirt, but every week, same time in the middle of the night, anyone who want to talk, digs open the hole.

  “And then we say short things. We learn names. When a new girl comes, someone shows how to use telephone.” She said something in Russian, and Lenkov translated it.

  “ ‘This is how we got to know our neighbours.’ ”

  “Neighbours,” said Volkov. “Yes, our neighbours in hell. This is how we know our names, where we are from, what we did there, how it happens to us that we are bring to this place. That men rent us for a week.”

  “Did Larysa ever talk?”

  “She was there shortest. But she is alive?”

  “James told you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “You got to know him a little.”

  “I only see him twice, but yes, I know him now. He is also …?”

  “He’s alive. He was badly injured when the roof of that room fell in.”

  “Where is Larysa?”

  “I don’t know. But she’s alive. I know she’s alive.” Volkov went into herself, her eyes tracked down. “It must have been just as hard to choose to go on,” Hazel said.

  “I wanted to live to thank …” she broke off and put her forehead in her hands. Then, a moment later, composed: “And to know about Bochko …”

  “Bochko?”

  “Big boss.”

  “Did you ever meet him?”

  “Yes. Big man with muscle.”

  That was him. “His name was Lee Travers,” Hazel said. “He’s dead now.”

  “Good.”

  “Larysa … Kitty … killed him.”

  Katrina didn’t say anything. After a moment, she withdrew her hand from Hazel’s and used it to press the button that lowered her bed. Her eyes were closing even as it went down. But a very faint smile played on her lips.

  Hazel left the room and started for the ICU, where James was still under heavy sedation. She and Emily had c
ome the day before and sat with Michael in James’s curtained nook full of machines. In the intervening twenty-four hours, part of the investigation had begun to focus on who Travers was, and already details were coming in. They traced him back to Michigan and discovered that it had been true that he’d taken casino management at U of M. But his picture, and not his name, had confirmed this for them. He’d taken his degree under the name Judson Carmichael, and he’d matriculated in 1994. He’d worked in other casinos. Each employment lasted fewer than four and a half years. Some were less than a year. They had only just started to disseminate the details of their case to other agencies when the phones began to ring. In Perrysville, Maryland, Carmichael had gone by the name Harvey Kellog. He’d been an assistant manager in the casino there, and his boyfriend had met with a suspicious end. Kellog had left the state, and six months later, a man seeding his field had found a pile of partially burnt women’s clothing. That had led to a terrible discovery in a derelict barn. That was after just one day of spreading the information. They dreaded what else would come up. Ten years was a long time to be a freewheeling psychopath.

  Now, on Thursday afternoon, she entered the cordoned-off space where Wingate’s body was still being operated from without and said hello to Michael. After half an hour of silence, he said, “I can tell you a little about myself, if you want.”

  “Only stuff I could find out by Googling you,” she said. “I don’t know what the rules are here.”

  “That’s fair. Google would tell you I’m a props master for film and TV. I handle all mechanical props, like appliances, weapons, devices – ”

  “Devices?”

  “You know, the box with the switch and the light on it that’s in every other episode of 24?”

  “I don’t watch TV.”

  “Anyway, I make that box.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I live in New York, and I have for thirteen years.”

  “And you are … married? Single? Kids?”

  “You wouldn’t find that on Google,” he said, and he offered her a conciliatory smile.

  They sat on either side of Wingate’s bed for half an hour after that, not saying much. The machines breathed for him, and the monitors watched him, and it felt like it would take a long time before anyone could tell her what his fate might be.

  Normally, she’d just have taken it. But she was going by the books now: she requisitioned it out of evidence. Then Greene had asked her about it and told her he’d have to check with Willan. He told her to come back after lunch. She had two hours to kill then, and she decided to use them wisely: she decided to take in the late August air and try to settle her jangling nerves. She had the thought of driving somewhere and just sitting and watching the leaves move around in the wind. But instead she stayed in town and walked down Main Street a ways, and then up, north, into the oldest residential streets of the town. She’d known that part her whole life, and she looked at some of the houses she’d been inside. On some streets, she’d been in all of the houses; she’d known the names of successive generations, successive owners. It was like she could pass through the very walls. Although some of these houses had been the homes of childhood friends, most of her experiences within them were adult ones. After thirty-five years on the force, she’d had cause to be in many of these houses.

  After her walk, she went back down to Main Street to The Station House Grill for lunch and let herself have a BLT. She’d eaten lunch in the Station House at least a thousand times. It had been on this same spot for eighty years, forty years more than the now-demolished train station it had been named for. It had never changed. Dmitri Agnostopolis had opened it, his son Jim took it over, and Jim’s daughter-in-law, Grace Wong, owned it now. Grace made a coconut cream pie almost as good as Cathy Wiest’s.

  But the Station House and the houses in the old part of town were among the few things that weren’t changing here. Not only were the crimes Port Dundas was seeing becoming more serious, but the outside world was truly infecting it now. When she was a kid, no one particularly cared for this part of the province in the summer, with its bug-infested waterways and its tiny towns with nothing to recommend them except for a few guesthouses on the water for fishermen. It changed slowly at first. The urban middle class learned how to swim. Motorboats became affordable. The moneyed crowd figured out it was prestigious to have a summer place in the same province they made their money, a place of their own they could go to all summer, forever.

  And towns like Port Dundas couldn’t say no. Not to all that commerce, all that foot traffic. People got rich off it. But the gargantuan houses that were built on the new lots lasted a lot longer than the money did. Westmuirians had been squeezed out of their own countryside. It made her angry, but she’d accepted it by now.

  What was left of the town of her childhood she felt fiercely protective of. Main Street was the map of her life. She was eleven before her parents decided she was old enough to walk to town on her own, but the moment she was allowed to go, she was there all the time, running in and out of her father’s store, “helping customers,” going to the bank for change, looking at the river under Kilmartin Bridge, following the leaves skirling in rainwater in the gutters, buying sodas at Ladyman’s. (She looked at the venerable old restaurant now, through the window of the Station House. It was badly in need of three coats of paint both inside and out. The great old sign that poked out over the sidewalk, and famously had 109 lightbulbs in it, had been gone now for twenty-five years.) When she was eleven, the heart of the main drag had been O’Connor’s Stationery, the S. Baker Pharmacy, L’il Folks Shoes (and beside it, the more solemn, leathery-smelling Famous Footware), Micallef’s, The Station House, Ladyman’s, the Riverside Café, Porelli’s Grocery, Porelli’s Meats, the Red Door Bakery, a Stedman’s, and the cinema – The Beverly – which had been her favourite place in town.

  By the time she was thirteen, she felt like she owned the town. She knew every inch of it, was a repository for its dailiness, its history. People used to joke that the mother was in City Hall and the kid was directing traffic out on Main Street. There wasn’t a soul who didn’t know her on sight.

  Now her mother was coming to the end of her life, and her own personal Port Dundas was vanishing. Charles O’Connor had died in 1965, the Porellis closed up both their shops and moved to Kitchener in the 1970s. Stores came and went, although the ornately carved keystones above their doors, and the beautiful lintels and soffits were still there if you traced your gaze up the rain-softened stone. She had truly kept watch over this place her whole life, and now she felt the first moment of the final act beginning. Ray Greene was in charge. Willan had anointed him. And they were going to straighten the 41 so it ran east of the townsite, that was surely going to happen. They’d connect Mayfair in a straight shot to Port Dundas and Fort Leonard without actually running the highway through the middle of town. It was going to miss Dublin entirely. She wondered if the investors in Tournament Acres knew anything about that. She suspected not. Then again, maybe that town would be saved. Maybe only Port Dundas would die.

  After lunch, Greene gave her permission to do what she’d asked to do, and Hazel filled out the rest of the paperwork. She waited for Wilton while he was in the evidence locker in the basement, and then she drove down to Kehoe Glenn with the knife they’d found in Travers’s chest.

  There was a little cool sting in the air now. Summer was not officially over until September 21, but this always happened in the second half of August, this sudden encroachment into the heat. It never stopped shocking her when the summer began to end. You wait so long for it and then, like a switch being thrown, the cold makes its appearance.

  Cathy looked at Hazel through the screen door and then opened it, and Hazel walked in past her, touching the widow softly on the upper arm. She went into the kitchen and sat down, placing a paper bag on the table. Cathy came in hesitantly, seeing the bag and not liking it. But she took a seat.

  “I hope those are french
fries,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Then I’m going to have a drink. Do you want one?”

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  Cathy went to make the drinks and dropped an ice cube in each glass. “This is going to be an unpleasant experience, isn’t it? I can feel it.” She was weaving a little, side to side, against the counter.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have another,” Hazel said.

  “This is my first, Officer. But I am stoned. I presume I am not arrested.”

  “No.”

  She brought the drinks to the table. “So, why are you here?”

  “The girl’s name, the one you saw, her name was Larysa Kirilenko.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “No. And we haven’t captured her. Yet,” she added and reached for her drink.

  “So I have to leave my home again?”

  “No,” said Hazel. “I promise you, she’s gone. You’ll never see her again.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I know what happened to her now.”

  Cathy didn’t want to know, though. Hazel could see the fear in her eyes. Now was the moment she would learn how her husband had earned his death.

  “What’s in the bag, Hazel?”

  “I told you Henry might have been trying to help her. She was in a place … a place there was no way out of. I saw it. I do think that Henry was trying to help her. I think he found out somehow through Jordie Dunn and that’s why he went there. Somehow Larysa was able to stab a guard with a knife and she took the guard’s stun gun. That’s how she got out. But she was six kilometres from where Henry’s truck was found. So either she tracked him, with an intent to kill him, or he told her where to go, to meet him.”

  “And what was he going to do with her when she showed up?”

  “Bring her to the police? Get help? But she killed him instead. She used the stun gun, which she had probably seen used down there. They’re not supposed to kill, not even this type. It was an early kind of stun gun, called a Lea Stinger. Russian. She must have known it wasn’t lethal. And she had the knife, which she did use to kill with. Twice.”