“Yeah, we do, but she’s out of town.”
Dion said, “My keys.”
Leith said, “I gave ’em to Thackray.”
Thackray pointed at the bulletin board on the wall, where he’d tacked Dion’s keys. Dion stuck them in his pocket and headed for the exit, but didn’t get far. The little old lady stepped in front of him and spoke to him in tongues. Even after he told her he didn’t speak her language, she kept at it. Leith wasn’t sure why she picked on Dion. Maybe because he had dark hair and dark eyes and looked like he could be at least part native. In the right light.
Like Thackray before him, Dion did his best, making a yacking gesture with his hand at his mouth, shaking his head at the woman, saying, “Sorry.” Leith and Thackray grinned at each other, and the old lady went quiet. Dion turned to Leith with arm outstretched, pointing at the wall, and said, “Willy’s at the Super 8 diner every morning about seven. You must have seen him there, old Indian guy, white hair. He could translate for you. Ken could probably tell you how to reach him.”
“Willy …” Vaguely, Leith recalled a white-haired gentleman in the Super 8’s little gingham-tabled restaurant, sitting at the window booth, outlined by predawn darkness, drinking coffee. “Ken,” he said. “Who’s that?”
Dion stared at him. “He serves you breakfast every morning. Right? Ken Cheng?”
And with that he was reaching for the door handle again, and Leith wondered if this was it, he would now just climb into his cruiser and shoot away back to his home posting of Smithers, a one hour’s drive south, without so much as a goodbye or a swell to know you. Recalling the paperwork Giroux had been flapping about earlier, Leith shouted after him, “You have to clear it with the boss before you go, right?”
“I did,” Dion shouted back, and was gone, out into the falling snow.
The old native lady looked exasperated, and Thackray said to the door, “Goodbye, Mr. Sunshine.”
* * *
Getting a translator for the little old lady was Thackray’s problem, really, but Leith decided a change of pace to the day would be good for him, and he offered to do it himself. Sometimes to run a simple errand is rejuvenating. Solve an easy puzzle and feel good about yourself for a change.
He crossed the highway on foot to the Super 8 and talked to the short-spoken little Asian fellow who served him and the other out-of-towners breakfast every morning — sure enough, the name was Ken Cheng — and asked him about a customer named Willy. Mr. Cheng told him, yeah, Willy hung out here most mornings — in fact, he left about an hour ago. He didn’t have a lot of money, taught languages at the Continuing Ed place sometimes, for free. But not many people were interested in language learning, so Willy mostly just walked about town or went fishing in the season. Mr. Cheng didn’t know Willy’s address.
Leith re-crossed the highway on foot, jumped into his SUV, and drove to the Continuing Education building, where he spoke to a woman there who knew Willy and had his address on file. No phone number, sorry. She told Leith that Willy wasn’t a translator, really, not too good with English, more a teacher of the old language, but he’d probably be able to help out in a pinch.
Not feeling much rejuvenated, Leith punched the address into his GPS and drove to the address the woman gave him, a rundown apartment low-rise in the poorest nook of the village. He climbed the stairs and knocked on the door. He heard loud music and loud shouting and a loud dog barking incessantly, all from behind thin walls, and his nerves danced. Nobody answered his knocking, but the shouting in the next apartment went quiet, and a native teenager who should have been in school looked out and asked him what he wanted. Leith told him he was looking for Willy. The kid said, “What’s Willy done?”
Being in plainclothes, Leith mentally bellowed, Now why d’you assume I’m a cop? I could be the old guy’s perennial fishing pal. But on reflection he realized he couldn’t be anybody’s fishing pal; in this scenario, he could be nothing else but a cop. He said, “Willy’s not in trouble. I need him to translate for me. D’you know anybody else who could translate?”
“Translate what?”
Leith realized he didn’t have any idea. “Gitxsan, I’m pretty sure.”
The kid shook his head.
“Thanks,” Leith said.
“No problem,” the kid said and shut the door, and the shouting started all over again, and Leith realized it was aggressive but not angry shouting, and there was laughter thrown in, so it wasn’t murder after all, just some kind of party. The shouting was in English, but it wasn’t good English. It was slurred and mangled. Leith was glad he was white and middle-class and didn’t have to live next to these noisy bastards. Better yet, he didn’t have to be these noisy bastards. Poor Willy. No wonder he wandered the town.
Outside, the snow was ankle-deep but heavy and wet. His mission was a failure, and he felt far from good about himself, and it was high time to hand it back to Thackray, say go find your own damn translator. But then he saw him, a shambling figure walking along the side of the highway, head bowed, heavily dressed, and Leith said aloud, “I’ll bet my right arm that’s our man.”
He stopped the SUV and approached with his ID out, and the shambling figure stopped to watch him come in stony silence.
“Hi, excuse me, I’m looking for William Lloyd?”
“Why?” came the answer. “What’s ol’ Willy done?”
This wasn’t the first time Leith had lost his right arm, and he knew it wouldn’t be the last. He pocketed his ID. “Any idea where he is right now?”
The man who wasn’t Willy pointed to the big yellow sign on the main drag not too far ahead.
Leith drove the two blocks to the Catalina, stepped inside, and found a table where four native men sat. There were three middle-aged men speaking English — something about construction of a new road — and one old guy with wild white hair and mismatched eyes, one milky blue, who seemed to be mostly just listening. All four men looked at Leith as he walked over. This time there could be no doubt which was Willy.
There were greetings all around, and he was invited to sit down, in spite of being a fair-skinned, hazel-eyed detective from Prince Rupert. The three men listened while Leith spoke with Willy, asking him if he could do some translating for him. He didn’t mention the complainant’s name, Paula Chester, in case one of the three men listening was somehow involved in the crime. Who knew?
Willy said sure, he could do that, and his English didn’t seem so bad, actually. “Now?”
Leith called the detachment, and Thackray said Mrs. Chester had left, but he would pick her up again and bring her back. Fifteen minutes? Leith would have left with Willy then, except one of the three men had bought him a coffee. This guy too was from Prince Rupert but hadn’t been back in a while and wanted to know how things were going in the City of Rainbows.
After the unwanted coffee and chat, Leith drove Willy back to the detachment and found Thackray hadn’t yet returned with Mrs. Chester, so he left the old man in the more comfortable interview room, which would be the best place, he thought, for the translation process. Then he went back to his desk to get stuff done. The cute little errand hadn’t been so cute in the end, not the mood-boost he’d been aiming for.
As he was to find out later, it was some minutes after he’d left Willy in that room that the old man must have gotten bored with sitting looking at travel magazines and got up and wandered about the detachment a bit, finding himself in the primary case room, which should have been locked but wasn’t, and which took the Hazelton case on a whole new trajectory.
* * *
The apartment, which Dion had rented partially furnished when he’d moved to Smithers five months ago, still had the echo of an unloved place, and now on his return it had also the chill of vacancy. He dropped his gym bag to the floor and turned up the thermostat. The baseboards ticked alive, and in time the iciness began to thaw from walls
and furniture.
One of the first things he’d bought after landing in Smithers had been a Sony ghetto blaster from the local stereo store, and he stooped now to bang in a synthpop CD to scare away the silence. On the kitchen counter stood another welcome-back bonus, five beer left over from a twelve-pack he’d started on before heading out on the out-of-town assignment so many days ago.
With a beer in hand and the music blaring, he sat on the sofa and worked on forgetting the dirty backwaters of the Hazeltons and all its troubles. He was glad to be out of there and back into this pocket-sized city, with its fast food and yuppie pub and its strip mall. But there was a sense of something left unresolved, and it wasn’t just the full and sworn statements he had yet to give. It was mixed somewhere in the faces and the conversations that had flowed at and around him in the strange little settlement under that big mountain. There were conversations yet to be had and faces yet to be met, it seemed, and it was a weird and unsettling notion that nagged him even as he shook it off, finished a second beer, and bobbed his head to the music.
Whatever.
He had picked up a pile of mail from his box in the lobby, and he sat on the sofa and sorted through it. Most of it was junk and flew into the waste bin. Some bills to set aside and deal with later. There was also one slim envelope from Kate, which he looked at in wonder. She still wrote. After all his cold shouldering.
When he was in rehab, he’d refused to see her because his face was skewed and bruised, and he drooled when he spoke. He’d sent her a note saying the accident made them strangers, so she’d better delete his number from her list, find someone else. Even after his face straightened out and he learned to control his tongue, he knew he was far from fixed, and wouldn’t see her. He returned home, and since he’d been battling the RCMP to keep his job, he’d been in no mood to see her then either. So “just go” were the exact words he used at his apartment door as she stood there with a bottle of wine in her hand. He’d been blunt. “Don’t call, don’t write. When I’m good again, I’ll be in touch.”
The letter he held now was proof she just didn’t get it.
He went to add it to her other three envelopes he’d received since arriving in Smithers, stored away in a shoebox on the shelf, but it occurred to him that things had shifted again, and the faint hope of Kate was no longer even faint. He tapped all four envelopes on the counter until they were nicely square with each other, hesitated once more, and tore them in half. It hurt, but in a good way, he told himself, as he dropped the tatters in the wastebasket with the other junk mail. It was just another lightening of the load.
* * *
The old man named Willy was looking at the photographs still up on the bulletin board in the case room when Leith came looking for him. The photograph he seemed most interested in was that of Frank Law, blown up from a snapshot to show his handsome, smiling face. Frank’s front tooth was chipped, but otherwise his teeth were straight and white. And ask any local girl, she’d say the damage only added to his charms.
Leith said, “Sir, sorry, but this room —”
And Willy said, “Where has his girl gone?”
Leith stood next to him and looked at the picture of Frank. Posted within inches was the photo of Kiera, but Willy didn’t seem interested in her, which didn’t mesh with the question he’d just asked.
“She hasn’t been found,” Leith told him. “We’re still looking. We’ll never stop looking.”
Willy nodded, still studying Frank.
Leith frowned. Maybe the old guy was blindish. He put his finger under Kiera’s picture and said, “D’you know her, sir? Ever met her in person?”
Willy looked at him and at the photo he was indicating. He looked harder at the picture and said, “Nope.”
“She’s the singer who went missing. Kiera Rilkoff?”
“Yes, yes.” Willy nodded in recognition at the name. “It’s a sad story.”
There was still something off-key with this whole exchange. “She’s Frank’s girl. You know that, right?”
Willy grinned. “He got a lot of girls.”
“Hey?”
Willy stopped grinning and said something in his native tongue, but only to himself.
Leith tried for the unequivocal approach. “You asked about his girl. You mean her?” His finger was on Kiera’s picture again.
“No,” Willy said. “The Laxgibuu. Wolf House. Bilaam is her name. The singer.”
Leith puffed out a breath. What he needed was a translator for this translator. Willy appeared to be searching his mind too, and finally he said, “Charles West. Bilaam. His girl. Never came back to finish up. I ask around, nobody know.”
“Charlie?” Leith said.
Willy nodded and smiled. “Charlie.”
Leith nodded now, relieved that they were finally getting somewhere. “Charlie West went back to Dease Lake. That’s where she’s from.”
“From Gitlakdamix,” Willy said, correcting him. “New Aiyansh. Whole family went up to Dease. They follow the jobs, eh. Mom and dad died. Car accident, you know? Horrible. Sad.”
“Right, okay. So you know her well, Charlie? What makes you say she’s Frank’s girl?”
“She come by with this boy, to the school. Frank, he wants to see too.”
“See what?”
Willy, so brief till now, suddenly spouted off at length. “Come to see her sing her own words. I teach her the words. She grow up away from all what made her, you know? Lost it all, but they’re coming back. I am bringing them back to her.”
To Leith this was becoming one big, irrelevant headache. Rob Law’s ex-fiancée was taking language lessons, or singing lessons, or find-your-roots lessons, or some combination, from this old guy, and she had taken Frank with her to one of their sessions because he was interested, and the old guy assumed they were a couple. So what? “When was this that she came by with Frank for lessons?”
Willy said it was late last summer. September. He nodded at his memories. “Good singer. Smart. I hope she comes back and finishes up. Her music is fine and good things. You give me her phone number, hey? And I will call her. Maybe she does not understand that I will be gone soon. And then so will her songs be gone.”
Leith went to the files and found the phone number for Charlie West in Dease Lake to give to the old teacher of the old language.
And that would have been the end of it, but the next morning he encountered by chance Willy in the Super 8’s diner and asked him if he’d talked to Charlie, and Willy told him no, he’d talked to Charlie’s sister, and the sister said Charlie had never made it home.
Which was puzzling and worrisome. Leith didn’t want to get into another painstaking back-and-forth with the old man, so he went across to the office and dug up the file once more. He looked at Spacey’s transcription of her call to Dease some seven days ago.
Q: Ms. West, you lived with Robert Law down here in Kispiox and his brothers Frank and Leonard last year?
A: Little bit, yeah.
Q: Why’d you leave?
A: Had a fight.
Q: Do you know Kiera Rilkoff?
A: Sure.
Q: She’s missing … any idea what happened to her?
A: Nope.
Charlie was a nickname. Her real name, as on Spacey’s notes, was Charlene. Wasn’t it? Well, wasn’t it? If there was a sister, could the nickname be some kind of … hell, no, that was impossible. He grimaced. Knowing the impossible was often called shit happens, he made some calls himself and learned with dismay that, yes indeed, there had been some gross miscommunication, that Charlene West was Charlie’s sister, one year younger, that Charlie’s legal name was Charlotte, that as far as Dease Lake knew, twenty-year-old Charlotte had gone to live with Rob Law in Kispiox. She hadn’t been home since.
Why hadn’t Rob corrected the mistake when Leith had brought the issue forw
ard in interrogation? Charlene. He recalled now that Rob had paused, had seemed baffled, but then gone on and let it pass. Maybe the logger had motive to uphold the lie; more likely he saw no point in correcting the dumb bull asking him questions.
Following some hours of telephone tag, Leith was able to connect with Charlene herself, and he put her statement to her over the line. “You told Constable Spacey last week that you lived with Rob Law.”
“Well, stayed with,” Charlene said. “Yeah. That week.”
Lived or stayed with, Leith thought. Amazing how a slip of semantics could throw a case so badly off the rails. “What week?” he asked grimly.
Charlene was a girl of short patience, and already she was speaking loudly to show she didn’t appreciate the interrogation. “Sometime April last year. Thought I might move down too, but then we had a big blow-up and I came home. Why?”
“What was the fight about?”
“My drinking, that’s what,” she said, and added belligerently, “But I quit, you know.”
“Good for you.” He said it gravely, wanting her to know he meant it, that he admired anybody who got off that road to ruin, that he hoped she stuck with the program. He said, “Do you know she left Kispiox?”
“Yes, I know.”
“I’m looking to contact her. It’s important. Do you have a number or address for her?”
There was silence on the line, and she said, “Why are you asking about Charlie? What’s going on?”
“Just a few questions about the case. She’s not in trouble.”
She remained tense. “I haven’t heard from her since September. She called from a pay phone, but the line was bad, and all I got out of her was she’s got some big decisions to make, something about her music. Said she may go away a while, has a lot to deal with, not to worry. I didn’t know ‘a while’ to her is six fucking months. I’m this close to reporting her missing.” She paused, and she seemed to listen to his silence, and there was sudden stoniness to her next words. “She is missing, isn’t she?”
“To tell the truth, we thought she was up in Dease Lake with you till now, so we haven’t been looking too hard. Which means she’s probably okay, Charlene. I hear she’s an independent girl. What else did she tell you in that phone call?”
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