And On the Surface Die

by Lou Allin

  Holly felt pressure build behind her temples. Gall owned some precious part of her mother. She wanted to throttle him, to wrench the necklace from his chest. Bridge the gap to her mother with something intimate and palpable.

  “She saw the rawhide getting thin. You can buy replacement strips at craft stores.”

  A flame long guttering sprang to life. “So then what?”

  He sat back in an odd reflective mood as if puzzling out the situation step by step. “That’s the funny part. I do some family counselling for the CASA in Sooke. They gave me clothes to take to the St. Vincent de Paul depot. That’s when I saw it. Must have been a couple of years after she...left.”

  “Someone was wearing it?”

  “No. It had been attached to a fresh piece of leather and was in their jewellery display. Costume junk for kids and teenagers.”

  It might have been there for a while. She knew the cramped little building that provided cheap clothes, bedding, furniture, the occasional toy or bike for those with meager resources. “Did you ask where it came from?”

  “One of the part-time clerks at the depot washes cars at Westcoast Collision. Got sucked up in the vacuum, he said. He heard a funny sound but didn’t think anything of it until days later when he changed the bag. The occasional spare change turns up. There was the amulet. The leather thong was broken. Didn’t like Indian stuff, he said, so he donated it. Someone else fixed it.”

  Holly sat back in amazement. Back only a few weeks, and now this. If she’d been here from the first... Something hurt in her throat as her voice rose. “But the car, the truck, whose was it?”

  With care and reverence, he tucked Raven back into his shirt. “I tried to find out. They do a hundred vehicles a week, more in tourist season. The kid’s honest but not that bright. He thinks it might have been a luxury car, like a Buick, leather seats. Maybe an SUV.” He tapped his temple in a “nobody home” gesture.

  “That’s not much help.” She shot him a look. “Did you go to the police?”

  “Bastards told me their resources were too stretched to expend any energy on a cold case. Years had passed. How did they even know this belonged to her? Others could have owned one. I lost my temper, tossed some papers around, and they threw me out. End of story.”

  She gazed out the window to where students trudged back and forth in the quad, burrowing under umbrellas in the pounding rain. Her thoughts running too fast to express in any coherence, she let silence fill the musty room. Gall’s eyes followed her. From contempt or interest? Could she trust this man?

  “Something occur to you?” His tone was cautious. As he lit another cigarette, his sleeve moved up his arm, revealing a medical bracelet, which indicated some vulnerability, from mere allergies to serious heart problems.

  “Was she wearing it the night she disappeared? That’s the important point.”

  He shrugged, reached for a cold cup of coffee. He hadn’t offered her any, but judging from the rime on the cracked cup, that was fortunate. “The last time I saw her, yes. A few days before Calgary.”

  Rising slowly, she eyed the pile of letters. “I have to go. Any chance you’ll let me look at those?”

  “What the hell for? There’s nothing relevant to her disappearance. You’ll have to believe me.”

  “Why should I? I just found out that you exist.”

  He grinned. “Funny, but you sound like your mother.” He glanced at the copier. “It might be painful for you. But if you’re sure you can handle it, why not? You’re a big girl.”

  He made duplicates of the letters, put them in a brown envelope, and handed it to her. Then he picked up another CD. Women of the World, acoustic music by some of the world’s leading female artists. “Take this. I bought it for her last week. I’m always buying her things, almost forgetting that she’s...gone.” Holly took the gift with thanks. She hadn’t expected to like him, but the gesture was kind. He was exposing his wounds to her. “What do you think happened to my...to Bonnie?”

  He took his time replying, as if the process opened deep wounds long scabbed over. “She was headed past Gold River, then up some backroads over to Tahsis on the west coast. Something about setting up an information centre, making contacts, that sort of thing. Helluva wild country, but she’d dare anything with that bloody Bronco. Last she called me was from a motel in Campbell River. The rains were bad that weekend. Even snow at the higher altitudes. It’s possible that she might have run off the road and never been found.”

  “As simple as that?” The words were dust in her mouth. Somewhere, if she looked long enough... She couldn’t finish her own thought.

  “Despite the notorious clear-cuts and the publicity about Clayoquot Sound, most of this island is still wild and lonely territory. But think about this: If you’re going to help good women get away from bad men, those men aren’t going to love you. They’re substance abusers, and they’re violent. The worst have served time. Their women and children are their only possessions.”

  “Anyone come to mind?” How much did he know about Bonnie’s work?

  “So many ugly cases over the years. She didn’t discuss names with me. Breach of ethics. And in a small community, I might even know the person.” His eyes were slightly narrowed, as if sizing her up. “So now that you’ve met the ogre in his den, what are your plans?”

  “I’m posted to Fossil Bay now, and I have access to records. There’s a chance we might find out what happened to her.” She was conscious of using the word “we”, and suddenly felt traitorous towards her father. But surely they all had the same goal. “I’ll stay in touch if anything turns up.”

  He tossed her one last question. Impertinent or frank. “Are you going to show the letters to the old man?”

  The Old Man. She supposed he meant in it in the vernacular. Her father would never be old, would he? Mustering her dignity, with an even voice, she answered, “And break his heart? No one could be that cruel.”

  At the Kangaroo Road curve that night, she was nearly sideswiped by a logging truck over the line. Her blood pressure spiked, but the Prelude held the road like a cat in gumboots. She thought of her father and that damn tiny car. With the burgeoning population in the Western Communities, the traffic to Victoria was a crapshoot with loaded dice. He avoided rush hour traffic and travelled only three days a week, but she shuddered to think of how that toy might collapse like a billfold.

  She mentioned it to him after dinner. “Gas has gone up to 1.295 a litre with hell between us and peak oil, and you think I should get a larger car? My dear girl.” He finished the last crumb of chocolate layer cake and tossed down his serviette. “Follow me. I want you to see something amazing. I did not purchase that vehicle on a whim or because I’m merely...frugal. Give your paterfamilias credit.”

  They went upstairs to his computer, where he spent a few minutes clicking on Google, then Videos. Bouncing in his seat like a kid, he turned to her with a grin. “Here we are. Road tests of the Smart Car. It’s made by Mercedes, you know. Precision German mechanics. They lost the war but not the engineering race.” Then he turned up the sound.

  She watched in horror as the unpiloted car barrelled down the road cartoon-style, hellbent on its mission, then smashed into a concrete barrier and bounced to a stop. When the dust settled, the cage was intact, the integrity complete. She let out a giant breath. “Whooee. I am so impressed.”

  Her father stood back, arms folded in an “I told you so” pose. “Now where am I going to get into an accident like that? Eighty miles per hour. I’m hardly driving over fifty kilometres most of the time. Your mother was the speed demon, remember?”

  Later that night, reading in bed, she welcomed Shogun up with her for moral support. Then she started examining the letters. At first they were innocuous enough. Something about missing him, which could have a collegial interpretation. But the last two seemed to support Gall’s scenario. Her mother’s idiosyncratic angular handwriting made time disappear. “I’ll need to think about your
proposal,” it read. “But my heart tells me that we have such little time on earth. Holly is on her way, building her own life as it should be.” Then in the final letter, dated the week before she disappeared, she said, “I’ve made up my mind. Leaving will sting Norman, but his career will sustain him. And he’s a good-looking man. It’s possible he’ll find someone else, given time. Next week I’ll contact Richard Mayhue. If he can’t handle the divorce, he’ll know someone who can. This time in a few months, my love, we’ll be together forever. Or as much together as my life can manage.” Something rose in Holly’s throat as lyrics from an inane disco song wormed into her ears. “Together forever, forever, we two.”

  Holly moved her legs under the quilt, and Shogun growled and jumped off the bed, looking at her accusingly. Had an event in his past spooked him about certain movements? Had he been kicked off a bed as a pup? She heard a toilet flush and shoved the letters under a pillow. Sometime she might tell her father. Perhaps he already knew. But that gave him a motive for...she didn’t want to follow that thread. It would destroy her life.

  The door, already ajar, opened as she heard a discreet “knock, knock.” She looked up, afraid that the letters under the pillow were burning a hole in the mattress. “So there you are, Shogie. In a lady’s boudoir, no less.” Norman gazed at Holly in assumed innocence. “Are you two good friends now?”

  She cast a suspicious glance at the dog, now lying on the carpet and grooming one foot in a meticulous fashion, the little prince. “Whenever I move my legs, he does this Charlie Manson act.”

  Her father chuckled, rubbing his chin. “Just a border collie. Ignore him.”

  She laughed. “Like you’ve been reading to me from the forums on the net? My dog eats holes in the drywall. Oh, it’s just a border collie. Barks my ears deaf if I stop to talk to someone. Oh, it’s just a border collie. Rolls in dead salmon. Oh, it’s... You get the point. These dogs get forgiven for everything.”

  Her father snapped his fingers, and Shogun got up to leave. “Be a realist, Holly. He’s not a GSD. To serve and protect is not his watchword.”

  She fluffed her pillow, then sat back. “I wonder what his watchword is?”

  “He’ll let us know. Don’t they always?”

  She slept fitfully that night. Two geese, identified by their companionable chatter, had put her house on their flight path. Not at all migratory, the local flock flew daily rounds to visit farms and pastureland. Why bother with that north and south nonsense when they could stay in paradise? Where in this unnatural Eden did they nest safe from cougars, in swamps where the skunk cabbage grew? Their honking, at times canine and at others almost human, kept awakening her from the deep REM levels that would refresh her. Pounding the pillow, she remembered a news story about a grandmother killing her family after hearing “commands” from the geese. Now there was a unique excuse. Had it worked?

  Nine

  Ann came into Holly’s office a few days later, bearing a fax. “This just in.”

  A “Thanks.” A smile passed between the women. Mike was in the clear on the condom package prints, but Billy’s prints from the left thumb and forefinger matched in twelve different ways, substantial proof. Disappointing news. The young man had seemed honest. Now he was in serious trouble. After studying the whorled diagrams and the arrows of comparison, she called Whitehouse. “It’s still ambiguous. Maybe there’s another girl involved. Maybe the package was there from an earlier rendezvous.”

  “Give me a break.” He snorted. “But how did you get those fingerprints again?”

  “Purely voluntary. There had been a car broken into at the park.”

  “That’s one thing you did right. My compliments. Get those boys in this afternoon. I’ll be right over. Our problems with this annoying case are nearly over. When they’re faced with hard evidence, they crumble like burnt toast.” He hung up with a perfunctory grunt.

  Holly craned her head into the main office. Chipper was at one of the computers. She’d assigned him to looking into the sporadic radio connections on the southern island. In a crisis, communication lines were crucial, especially with only one coastal artery. A killer tsunami, well-documented in native oral history, could leave them as helpless as the Salish woman tossed into a tree. She fell from the branches and became a hunchback, but lived to tell a tale so amazing that it had survived without paper for three hundred years.

  A mug of fragrant jasmine tea by his side, he was making notes, biting his lower lip in such concentration that he looked like a schoolboy. “Chipper,” she called. “We need you over at Edward Milne for a pickup. Tell them to send a counsellor if the parents can’t come. Whitehouse wants this done ASAP. And don’t let the boys sit together. Put one in the front.”

  Holly gave serious thought to the way she had entrapped Billy, the specious reason for taking prints. But both boys had volunteered. If they had been innocent of that crime, why would they have refused? Did they play a role in Angie’s death? Within legal limitations, bringing out the truth was the goal. An officer without compassion was a danger, but too much empathy was an emotional straitjacket. She thought of Mrs. Jenkins and felt strangely disloyal.

  The boys arrived at noon. Whitehouse took Billy first and Holly sat nearby, along with a mousy female counsellor who seemed more attentive to the condition of her cuticles than the unfolding scene. She wore designer jeans, plastic barrettes in her unnaturally russet hair, and a peasant blouse, giving her the appearance of a student who had stayed too long at the fair.

  The shabby interview room was silent as Holly began the recording at Whitehouse’s nod. He didn’t open the window but let the heat build. Holly’s tie choked her as she fought the urge to adjust it. Sweating characters in search of an author. Opening with ponderous formalities, the Inspector stared down his long nose and used pauses like whips, watching Billy’s pupils enlarge as an open condom package was taken from a labelled brown paper bag and placed on the desk.

  His eyes sought Holly’s, making her uncomfortable. “But I thought...you said—”

  “We’re ready to start,” Whitehouse said. He turned to the counsellor, giving her a severe appraisal. “Ms Drew, is it? You understand that everything you hear in this office stays in this office.”

  The woman cleared her throat and shifted in her chair. “My profession involves confidentiality.”

  “Now, son,” Whitehouse said in a curiously avuncular tone. “You’ve said you were alone on the beach with Mike. This is not consistent with your prints on this piece of evidence.” He moved the package with a pair of tweezers, dangling it like an evil charm. “What were you both doing that night? This is your first and most important chance to tell me your side. We know what happened.” Holly looked at the Rorschach watermarks on the stippled ceiling. He was using such a hackneyed bluff, from Thirties black-and-white films to The First 48. Sometimes it worked. Career criminals “lawyered up”. Billy didn’t stand a chance.

  Holly watched the numbers on the recorder roll. A muscle on Billy’s jaw twitched, but he said nothing. His oversized hands seemed frozen on the chair handles, until one finger began to tremble. Whitehouse narrowed his eyes like a veteran eagle toying with a rabbit. “Textbook case, Corporal. Wouldn’t you agree?” he said. “The failure to make eye contact is very suspicious.”

  Billy inhaled deeply, flaring his nostrils. A pulse beat a frantic escape at the side of his neck. “I want to tell you the...the truth.”

  “It’s about time, isn’t it? You should have done that from the beginning.” Whitehouse’s fist pounded the desk, then he folded his hands as if nothing had happened. Tensions rose and fell with the tides. From somewhere far away, a time-challenged rooster crowed.

  Like a beaten dog, Billy shook his head and ran fingers through his heavy black hair. “I know, but it didn’t sound good.”

  “We’ll be the judge of that. Go on. You’re making an honest start.”

  “Not after the girl drownded...drowned. Who’s going to believe me now
? Even if Mike was there.”

  “Right, and he’s your buddy. What’s he going to say, other than to make you look as righteous as possible? I thought you said you were telling the truth. Smarten up.”

  Righteous. Holly winced at the Ebonics, or was it Mafiaspeak? “He wouldn’t lie for me. Not if I’d hurt someone.” His voice forced against breaking, the boy sounded wounded. Under heavy black lashes, he looked down at his patched jeans more as an embarrassment, not a minor fashion statement. A huffing sound from Whitehouse caught everyone’s attention.

  Ms Drew’s eyes ricocheted back and forth as she sat rigid in her chair. A convenient prop, she knew little about why they had come together.

  With a barely discernable motion from Whitehouse, Holly leaned forward, her voice soft and urgent. “So tell us, Billy, in your own words. What happened that night?”

  Billy gave a long sigh, as if something deep inside ached. He tried to speak, but swallowed instead, then moistened his dry lips. “Could I have a glass of water, maybe?”

  Whitehouse drummed his fingers. Holly went to the cooler, hitting the blue button and praying it wouldn’t stick and flood the floor. “Thanks, Miss, I mean Officer,” Billy said.

  He finished in a few gulps, then held the glass in his large hands like a chalice. She wondered if it would break into a hundred pieces like in the movies, but he cradled it gently.

  “It happened the same as I said before.”

  Whitehouse leaned forward with a menacing snarl. “We’re not here to listen to that crap again. We know what happened. We only want you to explain it. I told you to—”

  Holly spoke quietly, trying to establish an atmosphere of trust. “I think Billy has more to tell us, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He managed a sweet puppy-dog smile that girls would find appealing. Unlike many of his peers, his skin was clear and smooth, bronze with high cheek bones. “We had a fire on the beach. Mike was burning some sweetgrass, ’cause his mom’s been pretty sick. Like a ritual.”