Blackfly Season

by Giles Blunt

  “And Vancouver? Can you give us an address?” Delorme asked.

  Terri shook her head. “Not yet.”

  “What about an address for your parents?”

  “I don’t want you to call my parents. I’m not a child, Detective.”

  “Of course not. But talking to your family will help us piece together your background, sort out possible enemies.”

  “I left home when I was eighteen. I’ve looked after myself ever since. My parents moved out of the city and I only see them every couple of years, if then.”

  “Why is that?”

  The girl shrugged. “We don’t have anything in common.”

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “One brother. He’s a few years younger than me.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Kevin.” The girl’s hand flew to her mouth.

  “What’s wrong?” Delorme said.

  “It’s just, I’m not sure. I said Kevin but I’m not sure. It may be Ken or something like that. Some things are still pretty fuzzy.”

  “Can we contact him?”

  “He’s away right now.”

  “Away where?”

  “Um, I don’t know.”

  “You hesitated. Why is that?”

  “Because I’m not sure if I just don’t remember where he is or if I never knew.”

  “Really,” Delorme said. This girl could end up being a lot less helpful than they had hoped. “Do you live in a house? An apartment?”

  “A house. In a house with a bunch of people. It’s downtown, I think.”

  “Are there any landmarks nearby? Churches? Clubs? Bridges?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. It’s a rundown house somewhere downtown. I called directory assistance to see if they had a listing for me, but they don’t. The phone must be in someone else’s name.”

  “Do you remember the names of your roommates?” Delorme said.

  Terri shook her head. “I don’t. I can see their faces, some of them, but I don’t have names yet.”

  Cardinal pulled out photographs of Wombat Guthrie and other members of the Viking Riders. “What about these faces? Any of them seem familiar?”

  The girl peered at them for a few moments. “No. But that doesn’t mean much just yet.”

  “Do you remember where you were staying in town here?” Delorme said.

  Terri winced a little, wrinkling her nose. “Very vaguely. A motel out on a highway.”

  “Do you remember the name of this motel?”

  “Sorry.”

  Delorme leaned forward in her chair. “The highway—did it have a lot of shopping malls on it? Or was it kind of empty?”

  “There were malls. And motels and cottages.”

  Cardinal looked at Delorme. “Lakeshore,” he said. “Has to be.”

  “Can you describe the motel?” Delorme asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Anything at all would be helpful. Was it wood or brick, for example? Or if you remember the colour …”

  “I just told you, I don’t remember.” Terri put a hand to the small bandage on her temple. “I’m getting a headache.”

  “All right,” Cardinal said. “Just a couple of more questions.”

  “Do we have to? I was feeling so good and now I feel so lousy.”

  “How many days were you at the motel?” Cardinal said.

  “I don’t know. It could be one, it could be three, I just don’t know.” She sniffed, and her eyes watered a little.

  It looked—to Delorme’s skeptical eye, at least—a little rehearsed. She was an actress, after all. But all she said was: “What made you come to Algonquin Bay?”

  “It was to see my boyfriend. Tom. His name’s Tom.”

  “Tom what?”

  “Josephson. Tom Josephson.”

  “He lives here, and you live in Vancouver? How does that work?”

  “We split up, sort of. He came here to stay with some friends—I don’t know them. I came here to talk him into coming back. They were staying at this place out on the lake. Oh, my head really hurts.”

  “Which lake?” Delorme said.

  “I don’t know. Some lake.”

  It could be any one of ten lakes in a fifty-mile radius.

  “Anyway, he took me out there. And I spent the afternoon.” Terri reached for the call button and squeezed. “God. I really need something for my head.”

  Cardinal touched Delorme’s shoulder. “Why don’t we pack it in for now,” he said. “We’ll come back when she’s feeling better.”

  Delorme didn’t even look at him. She kept her eyes on the girl, whose lower lip was now quivering. “What happened at the lake, Terri?”

  “We had a fight. A quarrel.”

  “What did you fight about?”

  “I don’t know. Personal stuff. What’s it matter?”

  “Obviously it matters very much. You have a bullet wound in your head. What did you fight about?”

  “I wanted him to come back to Vancouver with me and he didn’t want to, all right? Where is that fucking nurse?”

  Emotions would certainly appear to be coming back, Delorme noted, but there was something about the display of anger she didn’t trust. Something a little stagy.

  “What happened then? You fought, and then what happened?”

  “Sergeant Delorme,” Cardinal said.

  “Tom didn’t shoot me, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’s the most harmless guy you’d ever want to meet.”

  “So tell me what happened.”

  “We had a fight. I left. I walked down this endless dirt road. It was hot as hell and there were flies everywhere. It was a long way back to town so I put my thumb out. The second car that came along stopped.”

  “Make? Colour?”

  “Some bright colour—white or silver or something. It flashed in the sun and nearly blinded me.”

  “And the driver?”

  “I don’t know, all right? He had sunglasses on. Jesus Christ, lady, will you lay off me? Who the fuck do you think you are? I got a fucking bullet wound in my head and you’re treating me like a goddamn criminal!”

  She turned over on her side, jammed a pillow over her head and wept loudly.

  Just like they do in the movies, Delorme thought.

  The duty nurse came in. She looked at the girl quivering on the bed, then turned to the two detectives. Her glare was a vote for their immediate execution. She pointed to the door and said one word: “Out.”

  “Nice work,” Cardinal said in the corridor. “You should win some kind of sensitivity award for that little effort.”

  “Cardinal, we need information out of that woman. I don’t see why you’re pussyfooting around with her.”

  “Miss Tait is the victim here, remember. She has a bullet wound in her head. Browbeating her is not going to help. What would help is if you get on the horn to the Vancouver police. See if they’ve got a missing persons out on her.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “Get them to check school records, hospital records, anything that’ll give us some background.”

  “I thought you trusted her,” Delorme said.

  “I do. It’s her memory I don’t trust.”

  “You believed that stuff about having a fight? About hitchhiking? You think someone that looks like this woman is going to put her thumb out and accept a ride from a strange man?”

  “Maybe. If she was very upset. We don’t know her yet.”

  “I think she was making it up.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Her manner. Lack of eye contact. Vague when it suits her.”

  “Oh, you’ve worked with a lot of amnesia victims?”

  “I think she’s hiding something.”

  Dr. Paley was coming down the hall toward them. “Finished so soon? Why don’t we talk in my so-called office?”

  They followed him back to the overstuffed closet with its tin desk and st
acks of files. Dr. Paley closed the door behind them and excavated a couple of chairs for them to sit on.

  “I don’t understand,” Delorme said. “You told us on the phone Miss Tait was overjoyed to have her memory back. But our red-haired friend seems evasive and nervous and depressed.”

  “‘Depressed’ is not the right word,” Dr. Paley said. He made a note in a file, set it aside and swivelled to face Delorme. “I think ‘overwhelmed’ is closer. Miss Tait has been through a hell of a trauma—someone put a bullet in her head—and the implications of that are just beginning to sink in.”

  “But she doesn’t even remember anything about that.”

  “No, and she never will. But she knows it happened, now. She knows someone tried to kill her. And that knowledge is sticking—she’s not forgetting it like she has been for the past week—so this is her first continuous awareness of her predicament. I think anyone would be nervous and upset.”

  A sparrow landed on the windowsill beside the doctor’s desk, eyed Delorme suspiciously and flew away.

  “What you’re saying sounds right,” Cardinal said. “And we don’t want to press her too hard …”

  “That would be counterproductive. Right now she’s trying to bear up under a tidal wave of self-knowledge. And frankly, I think she’s doing rather well. She may be remembering things she doesn’t want to mention. We all have things in our past we’re less than proud of. They’re not necessarily relevant to her gunshot wound.”

  “Doctor, it’s going to be the negative stuff that leads us to her attacker,” Delorme said. “The Partridge Family isn’t going to cut it.”

  “I understand, Detective. I’m sure she’ll be more forthcoming as the days go by.”

  Delorme flipped through the pages of her notebook. “I’m looking at my notes from our first conversation. At that time you were certain that when she got her memory back, she would get it all back at once.”

  “Yes. Amazingly, that’s the way these things work. It’s as if a short circuit has been fixed. Suddenly the picture comes clear.”

  “Not this time,” Delorme said. “Miss Tait is remembering some things and not others. She remembers that she was staying in a motel, but not what colour it was. Not whether it was brick or wood. She doesn’t remember how many days she was there. She remembers visiting a place on a lake, but not which lake.”

  “Perhaps she never knew the name. If she was driven somewhere to a tiny lake, she wouldn’t necessarily know the name. Some of them don’t even have names. Or it could have been a bay of Trout Lake. Someone from out of town isn’t likely to know that kind of thing.”

  “Would she be capable of hiding something at this point?” Cardinal said.

  “Oh, yes. She could remember things she doesn’t want you to know. She might make something up to cover them. But as to actively misleading you—well, none of us knows her well enough to say whether she’s the kind of person who would do that.”

  Cardinal and Delorme were usually pretty much in agreement on how to proceed with a case, how to handle a witness, but the silence in the car was thick. Delorme stopped for a red light, and Cardinal silently counted the seconds.

  “Okay,” Delorme said. “How come she remembers that a silver car picked her up but she doesn’t remember who was driving?”

  “Come on. We get that all the time. People remember what shoes a guy had on but not whether he wore a hat or not. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “You didn’t have the impression she was picking and choosing what to tell us?”

  “I have the impression she’s recovering from a shock.”

  “Well, as far as I can see, she already has enough nurses. One more isn’t going to help.”

  “I think she’s telling us what she can. I mean, look at her. Does she look like a femme fatale to you?”

  Delorme gave him a sidelong glance. “Do you realize you’re always easier on women? You never question them as hard as you would a man.”

  “Not true,” Cardinal said. “I’ve put a few women behind bars in my time. You, on the other hand, seem to cut men a lot more slack.”

  “It’s possible.” Delorme shrugged, a gesture that always made her look, to Cardinal’s mind at least, very French. “Maybe it’s because I resent it more when women behave badly. Or when they don’t seem to know what’s in their own best interests.”

  “I don’t think Miss Tait falls into either category.”

  Delorme shook her head. “You’re so transparent, Cardinal. You don’t even know this woman, but you seem to think—just because she’s the same age as your daughter—that you understand her through and through.”

  “That’s so far from being true, I’m not even going to discuss it.”

  “But it is true.”

  “Really, I’m not even going to talk about it.”

  “Fine with me.”

  “You heading to Lakeshore or what?”

  Delorme shifted lanes to get around an SUV and stepped on the gas.

  In the forties and fifties, a lot of motels and cottages sprung up along Lakeshore Drive to take advantage of the beautiful view of Lake Nipissing. Then, in the sixties and seventies, they were followed by boxy apartment buildings. Naturally, the beautiful view no longer exists. On the north side you have the malls and the fast-food joints, and on the south side you have the motels.

  Close to town, you find the Phoenix, the Avalon and Kathy’s Kute Li’l Kottages, and there’s another cluster further along that includes Loon Lodge, the Pines and the ominously named Journey’s End. No one has ever satisfactorily explained how the last motel on the road, a plain red-brick bungalow, came to be called the Catalonia.

  The Catalonia is on the stretch of Lakeshore that curves up to join Highway 11. It is not right on the lake, but across the road, which is why its sign boasts of such amenities as free local calls, air conditioning and clean rooms. Cardinal and Delorme started at the Catalonia and worked their way back toward town, asking the proprietors if any of their guests had recently disappeared.

  Late spring is a slow time of year for these motels. Ice fishing and snowmobiling are long over, but the summer sports have not yet begun. And anyone who has visited Algonquin Bay and experienced the blackflies at this time of year is unlikely to make that mistake a second time. In short, there were very few tourists to go missing and, according to these old hands at the hospitality trade, none had.

  Over the next couple of hours, Cardinal and Delorme stopped at every motel on Lakeshore. None of the proprietors reported a missing guest, and none of them recognized Terri Tait’s picture.

  “Well, that was fun,” Delorme said when they were back at the town end of the strip.

  “She could have stayed somewhere else,” Cardinal said. “Some place we haven’t checked yet.”

  “She said it was by the lake.”

  “A lake, not the lake. There’s more than one, if you haven’t noticed.”

  “Okay, but why hasn’t anyone reported her missing? Even if only to get the motel bill paid?”

  “Motels get stuck a lot. They’re not going to call the police every time. And there’s always the other possibility…”

  “Which is?”

  “The people she stayed with are the ones who tried to kill her.”

  16

  MARTIN AMIS SET ASIDE his notepad and took a swig of beer. He was wearing blue jeans that looked just the right degree of lived in, and a cool white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. It had been Kevin’s idea to do the interview at the Gladstone Hotel. He wanted the famous novelist to realize that Toronto was just as hip as London or New York. Hipper.

  “Tell us about your working habits. Assuming you have some.” Martin’s tone was easygoing, but the Oxford baritone, not to mention his own literary achievements, gave his every utterance weight. “By which I mean, you make it look easy. One imagines Kevin Tait scribbling lines of verse on airplane napkins and parking tickets.”

  “Well, there’s some truth in that
,” Kevin said. “I have been known to scribble down an idea or two on a napkin. But you have to have discipline. You have to be willing to put in the time to make something work. I try to be at my desk anywhere from six to eight hours a day.”

  “That sounds more like a novelist’s schedule than a poet’s.”

  “That’s the way it is, Martin. I put in the hours like anybody else.” A little common touch, there. Never hurt anyone.

  “But I heard—and tell me if this is just legend—that you don’t even own a desk.”

  “My desk is wherever I put pen to paper. Doesn’t matter if it’s a table in Starbucks or a tree stump in a field.”

  “Sorry, mate. Six hours at a tree stump sounds uncomfortable. Six hours at a tree stump sounds crippling”

  Kevin took a sip of his single malt. Amis had assured him Vanity Fair would be picking up the tab.

  “You can write in a hurricane if it’s going well. Sometimes, it’s like the poem is just flowing in your veins. I’ll tell you, one time I made my morning coffee and I sat down at the kitchen table and started to write. I was working on ‘Needle’—lots of stanzas—and the words were just flowing. And then the light dimmed and I thought the bulb must have burned out. I got up to change it, and I realized there wasn’t any problem with the bulb. It was night.”

  “You’d worked through the entire day without realizing it? God, I wish that happened to me. I’d like to write for one minute and not realize it. One nanosecond. You have that sort of experience a lot?”

  “Once in a while. Not often enough.”

  Amis drank some more of his ale, set his glass aside and leaned forward. “Listen to me,” he said. This delivered sotto voce, a fellow conspirator. “The brutal truth of the matter is you haven’t finished a poem in six months, right?”

  “Things are a bit slow just now, that’s true, but—”

  “You’ve chased off the one person who truly loves you, who really cares about your talent, who really wants you to do well, in a fit of righteous idiocy. And you’re rotting in some kind of defunct summer camp with a couple of drug dealers any sane person would flee at warp speed.”

  Maybe Martin Amis wasn’t the best choice for an interviewer. Maybe he should have held out for Larry King. Someone a little less … prickly.