The Taken

14

Claire Eldwin lived thirty kilometres away in a town he’d never heard of, Mulhouse Springs. There were so many small towns in this part of Ontario that he figured you could live here for thirty years and not find them all. He was driving along Highway 79, to the west, below Gannon. There was a road every five hundred metres leading to cottages. If you owned a cottage up along here, then you were from away. It was like having another country nestled inside this one and he could see how the summers changed what home felt like for those who actually lived here.

The disconnect between this landscape and what sometimes went on in it was still hard for Wingate to accommodate. In Toronto, it didn’t take a great effort to sense the seething chaos that moved beneath the surface of civilized life in the city. There was always something on the verge of happening: as an experienced police officer, you could scent it under the patina of order. You could almost move yourself to its contrapuntal beat, be in the right place just as something was about to happen.

Only in the neighbourhoods where there was enough money and white skin to presume a kind of harmony did crime ever surprise you. Although not enough: there was always someone breaking down, a domestic that went ugly, someone craving silverware. Even so, his life at Twenty-one Division was truly clockwork: a drug bust at ten, a stolen bike at noon, a gunshot at two, high-school students threatening more than mere unrest at the Eaton Centre at exactly three-fifteen.

But here, here in Westmuir County, everything had a fugitive nature. You couldn’t read those closest to you, and this was because everyone’s guard was down. (Well, except for Hazel. He felt naturally closer to Hazel than anyone, precisely because she was slightly paranoid.) And because it seemed no one had anything to hide, and not even the police lived in a state of alert suspicion, it was possible to run the kind of plot they were caught in now: someone using a lake, a newspaper, the internet, and colourfully wrapped packages to tie a leash around an entire police force and tug it in the direction they wanted it to go in. It made him wonder if someone had specifically chosen Westmuir to bring all this stuff to life. It was worth a thought.

He’d called Eldwin’s house again on the way up and found the wife at home. She didn’t seem particularly surprised that he wanted to see her in person, just gave him proper directions and rang off. That only confirmed his theory. In Toronto, the police don’t call ahead, and what’s more, if they did, both sides of the conversation would hang up and immediately begin forming dire anticipations. Claire Eldwin, he found when he arrived, had put on the kettle.

She came to the door in a shiny gold housecoat with pale blue jeans underneath, and she was smoking a handrolled. Out of habit, he sniffed the smoke and checked off the tobacco box mentally. She blinked at him in her doorway, looking him over with interest and gripping the doorframe like she was going to twist it out of the wall.

It was a big house for two people, he thought, but it looked small because it was stuffed with furniture and knick-knacks. Either Eldwin or his wife collected obsessively. Cloth flowers, paperweights, small busts of famous composers, colourful replicas of birds in tiny gold cages. It all crowded in, making the rooms seem darker. She led him to an oval dining room table in wood that looked out onto a big garden full of larger, but equally extraneous, baubles. Cement arches, birdbaths, four little doghouses scattered along the serpentine flagstone paths that wound toward a stone fountain in the middle of the yard from its edges, looking as stranded as a ship run aground. There wasn’t a dog to be seen anywhere. He stood at the window as Mrs. Eldwin made tea. “It’s a quiet week,” she said. He looked at her quizzically. “You’re wondering why I have so many empty doghouses, aren’t you?”

“It occurred to me.” There was something strange about that yard, he thought. It wasn’t just its busy emptiness, it was something else…

“I sit dogs,” she said. “It was crazy busy over the long weekend, but there’s no one now. I had a St. Bernard, a Brittany spaniel, and a chihuahua for three days.”

“Sounds like a Disney film.”

“It wasn’t.”

He turned away from the window. She was pouring hot water into a teapot. “How long have you lived in Mulhouse Springs, Mrs. Eldwin?”

“You don’t look like your phone voice,” she said. “You sound like a small man on the phone, but you’re not.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I think.”

“It’s a compliment.”

He sat, accepting tea from her. “Well, thank you. You didn’t answer my question.”

“We moved a year after the wedding.”

She was at the very least extremely drunk. He could tell she’d been drinking when he spoke to her on the phone. A drunk interview could be good, but if you needed any of it later in court, someone might argue that the statements were unreliable. Still, he needed to know the basics. “And the wedding was when?”

“What?”

“When did you get married, Mrs. Eldwin?”

“September… two thousand and one. It’ll be four years this fall.”

“And before Mulhouse Springs, where did you live?”

“ Toronto,” she said.

“And why did you folks move up here? Mulhouse Springs isn’t exactly Yonge and Bloor.”

“It was Colin’s decision,” she said, coming to the table. “He wanted more space.”

“For what?”

“To ‘think,’ he said.” She gave a nasty little laugh. “Writers, huh?”

“What does he need to think about that he couldn’t think about in Toronto?”

Her face suddenly became serious. “I’ve stopped asking.”

Wingate put a cube of sugar into his tea and stirred it. “Tell me more about Colin.”

“Like what?”

“Who do you think he went to see in Toronto?”

“Someone probably wanted to hire him to ghostwrite a computer manual. Or a biography of their cat.”

“Is that how he makes a living?”

She laughed that knowing, exasperated laugh again. “Make a living? Colin’s been working on the Great Canadian Novel for fifteen years. From long before I met him. He’s never published anything that actually had his name on it. You know, before the Westmuir Record.”

Wingate nodded. An unpublished writer and a dog-sitter had bought this house? “How did the two of you meet?”

Claire Eldwin reached behind her and took a pouch of Drum off the countertop and began to roll herself a cigarette. “In a class. Nine years ago. He sometimes fooled one of the colleges into hiring him to teach a continuing studies class.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“You know, adult education. Most institutions of higher learning have a cash cow on the side called ‘continuing studies.’ It’s evening classes taught by alcoholics and sexual deviants to anyone with a pulse and a chequebook. His class was called Get Published Now. You know the saying those who can’t, teach, right?”

“I’ve heard it said.”

“There’s a corollary: those who can’t teach, fuck their students on the side. That’s how we met. Romantic, huh?”

“Well, you married him.”

She lit the cigarette. “Guilty.”

“And now you think he’s having an affair.”

“Colin is always having an affair.”

“He sounds like a super guy. What’s his novel about?”

“Damned if I know. It’s the Great Canadian Novel. It’s probably about the snows of yesteryear. I can hardly wait. Do you want a drink?”

“No, thank you. Do you know where your husband’s staying in Toronto?”

“All I know is that it’s warm and wet.” “Mrs. Eldwin.”

She stood and went into the kitchen and took a bottle of Grand Marnier out of the fridge. “This stuff gives you a wicked hangover and then you have to drink more of it to get rid of the hangover. It’s the perfect consumer product. Imagine making yourself necessary.”

“I just want to get this straight,” he said. “The people who called your husband on Friday offered him a job, is that right?”

“That’s what I understood.” She leaned on the counter. “Why are you so interested in my husband, Officer? Just lay it on me: what’s he done?”

“He hasn’t done anything as far as we know. It’s just that… we think he might be in some trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“We’re not sure.” She looked at him, seemingly lost in thought. “Did you ever hire that PI?” he asked.

“Your boss offered to be of use, so I didn’t. Should I have?”

“No,” he said.

“You don’t think my husband is fucking some bimbo, do you?”

He hesitated a moment. “No, Ma’am. I don’t.”

“Well, you don’t know him, trust me.”

“It doesn’t sound like I’d want to.”

“No…” she said, rubbing an invisible mark off the counter-top. “You’d like him. Everyone likes him. He tries to be good.”

“Is that why you tolerate his behaviour?”

“I don’t tolerate it. I live with it.”

“You’ve got plenty of choices, Mrs. Eldwin. You could leave him. You could kick him out. Hell, you could kill him.”

She gave him a weird look. “You know, he tells me I should. Sometimes I think he’s just trying to preempt my anger, but I know he thinks he doesn’t deserve me.”

“Do you think that?”

“Everyone deserves their fate. You know that story about the rattlesnake that asks the horse to carry him across a flooded river?”

“I haven’t heard that one.”

“Snake says, Take me to safety, and the horse tells him to forget it, he’ll bite her if she lets him near. The snake says, If I bite you, we both die, and the horse sees his point and lets him get on her back. Halfway across, he bites her. You’ve killed us both, she says, why did you do that?”

“Because it’s my nature,” said Wingate.

“Right. How can I hate him for his nature?”

“You don’t have to love his nature, but you don’t have to live with it, either.”

She finally poured herself a drink. “You talk like a man who’s never been in love.” He watched her drain the Grand Marnier in one long draught. “You get used to being bitten when you’re in love. You find yourself getting used to the poison. You even start to crave it.”

She was pitiful. He couldn’t rule out that she was crazy enough to tie her own husband to a chair in their basement and chop off his hand. Maybe Claire Eldwin was the “her” that needed saving. “Do you mind if I take a look around?”

“Hey, mi casa, etcetera.”

He thanked her and got up from the table, went down the hallway behind the living room. It was a nicely appointed house with some decent paintings on the walls and shelves of books and CDs. The house spoke of people who spent money easily. So where did it come from? There were bookshelves in the hallway full of paperbacks and piles of magazines with their spines hanging over the edge of the shelves. He picked one off the top: a copy of People from a couple of years ago. He pushed the door open that led into the master bedroom, with its neatly made bed. He was out of Mrs. Eldwin’s view now, and he pulled on a pair of black gloves and opened the closet doors. Four seasons’ worth of slacks and pants and dresses and dress shirts hung from a bar. He ran his hand along the shelf above and then quietly clapped the dust off his gloved fingertips.

There was nothing of interest in the drawers, nor in the bathroom. On one of the bedside tables, he found a pile of paper with one of the drafts of Eldwin’s story on it. It was written over with small cuts and corrections. Eldwin had crossed out the word gaspingly and replaced it with mind-manglingly. Wingate looked more closely at the sentence. He thought the word Eldwin had probably wanted was horrorstruck. He made sure the papers looked the way he’d found them.

He retreated to the hallway. A guestroom with a convertible couch was across from the bedroom. Some books lay piled on the couch, leaning against one of the arms. The room next to it appeared to be Eldwin’s office, and Wingate spent a little more time in it, shuffling through papers on the desk. These appeared to be pages from the Great Canadian Novel. From what he could tell at a quick glance, Eldwin had been working on a section that took place in a mining town in northern Ontario. It looked as if Eldwin did most of his composing on his desktop computer, a bulky PC model at least six years old. Listening for Mrs. Eldwin, he leaned down under the desk and turned the computer on from the hard drive. It bonged softly and took two minutes to boot up, and then Wingate quickly searched the root directory for text files. He found the first four chapters of “The Mystery of Bass Lake,” but there was no evidence of the replacement chapters he’d told Portman he was going to send. He stared at the screen and then tried to open Outlook to go through Eldwin’s email, but the program was password-protected. Wingate blinked at the empty box and then typed in Verity and Verityforms, knowing he was just shooting in the dark, and neither worked. He couldn’t remember the DNS number from the back of the mannequin, but he was pretty sure that wouldn’t have worked either. He shut the computer down and then stood in the office a moment or two longer, looking at the shelves. The books here were mostly hardcovers, recent fiction in English, as well as some of the classics in old paperbacks. Tolstoy and Joyce. Chesterton, Gogol, and Graham Greene. On a higher shelf, Trollope and Flaubert and the essays of Michel de Montaigne. He realized these books were in the original French. He breathed in deeply and sighed an arrow of air out of his mouth. He wasn’t sure what any of this meant, apart from the fact that this guy was obviously hoping to punch above his weight.

Back in the hallway, he saw a closed door and, checking behind himself to be sure Mrs. Eldwin was keeping busy with her bottle, he went to open it. Behind it were stairs leading to the basement. He unsnapped the strap on his holster and switched on the light.

As he descended, he could see the basement wasn’t anything like the one in the video. It was upholstered and furnished: almost a separate apartment. There was an expensive-looking bar with four stools behind it and it was fully stocked with good whiskies and other liquors. A couch faced a fireplace and there was an end table stocked with interior design magazines. At the far end of the room stood a stationary bike and a rowing machine. He walked over to the bar and stood beside it. It was difficult to imagine the Eldwins as big entertainers, and he concluded that all of this, all this good living, was for them alone. There was a pair of birthday cards standing on the bar. He picked one of them up. It was one of those cards with an earnest, rhyming message on the inside on the subject of the inverse relationship between the recipient’s age and her beauty. The handwritten note said, You’re a flower that blooms more beautifully every year. I’m grateful for everything you’ve given me, my love, even if I’m the toadstool in your garden. Lots of love, Colin. Wingate stared at the card. Every relationship was a mystery.

He returned upstairs and put his cap back on. “Find what you were looking for?” she asked him.

“I wasn’t looking for anything,” he said. “Just seeing if anything jumped out at me.”

She swayed a little. He imagined she’d been able to get a couple more stiff drinks into her while he’d been snooping. “Did anything jump out at you?”

“No.”

“Well, then you can have that drink.”

He sat down at the table and let her pour him one. She put it down in front of him, but he didn’t touch it. “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“Before wasn’t personal?”

“I was just wondering how the two of you afford all of this. I mean, Colin isn’t a successful writer -”

“Yet,” she said.

“Right, yet. And you take in dogs. Does that pay well?”

“It pays okay. But not enough for all this,” she said, sweeping her arm out. “That’s what you’re asking?”

“Yes.”

“My parents died in a car accident six years ago and I got everything, including a large settlement. It was our chance to start over. I put everything into this house I thought he’d like to have. But I guess it’s not enough.”

“I’m sorry. About your parents.”

“You lose everyone eventually, or they lose you. There’s nothing to be done about it.”

He stood out on the sidewalk, looking back at the house. From the front, a nondescript, one-storey bungalow on a country sidestreet. There was no hint that a crazy, heartbroken woman lived behind that door, nor a man who could inspire the kinds of passionate feelings he’d seemed to inspire in his wife and, by her report, others. The world of the case had fully opened up now; so many parts of it were in motion. In his mind, he saw the elements moving over each other, emerging out of the fog of hints, beginning to jockey for position in the play of cause and effect, relationships and connections…

Suddenly, he realized why the view of the back garden had rattled him. In the most recent chapter of the Bass Lake story, the father had brought the body to a house with a flagstone path and a fountain. And – he turned and looked behind himself – a willow tree. There was one across the street, a huge, healthy willow with a wide trunk, its long green leaves cascading over the lawn it stood on. It was as if Eldwin had rearranged the elements of his own house for his story. There was nothing strange about that – writers had to draw on something. What was strange was that he’d had a fictional character bringing a dead body here, to his house.

He looked back toward the bungalow. He was imagining Mrs. Eldwin ranging madly through that huge backyard, waving a half-empty bottle of Grand Marnier at the heavens. They needed something else to fall into place now, something that would bridge the unknowns. He reached into his pocket with a gloved hand and removed the computer mouse he’d stolen from Eldwin’s office. He felt he already knew what Fraser would tell him when he ran the prints. He got back into his cruiser and pointed it east.