The Taken

30

Childress had driven Hazel back to Port Dundas in a frosty silence. Even when checking her blind spot on the right, Childress made an effort not to look at her. They put her up in Dianne MacDonald’s B &B and asked Dianne to let them know if it looked like the officer was planning to leave. Martha was meanwhile fuming in Glynnis and Andrew’s house, yet another storm on the horizon. But she was here, and that was all that mattered to Hazel now.

She woke up early and went into the station house. She called Jack Deacon and told him to pack Eldwin’s hand in a lot of ice and courier it down, same-day, to Twenty-one addressed to Superintendent Peter Ilunga. She instructed him to label it “EVIDENCE” and “PERISHABLE.” They had their own set of fingerprints from the hand, but she thought Ilunga deserved the chance to draw his own conclusions. It was too bad she couldn’t be there when he opened the box.

It was a quiet midweek at the detachment. She’d instructed Wingate to pick up Claire Eldwin and bring her in. It was time she knew the whole story, and Hazel wanted her in the station house to hear it. She’d been of two minds whether to tell Eldwin the full extent of the kind of trouble her husband was in, but she’d never been totally sure of the seriousness of the danger. Now she was, and Claire Eldwin had a right to know. Wingate was spending the morning writing up a full report of what they’d done in Toronto, something she deemed essential considering how far under Ilunga’s skin they were now. They might need to tell their side at some point, and having the official report was necessary. She knew Wingate’s report would be measured, accurate, and sober. When he told her Mrs. Eldwin had elected to come in under her own steam, it looked like it was going to be at least a couple of hours before she arrived and Hazel took the opportunity to have some downtime. She decided to go home for lunch and wait until Wingate called to say Eldwin was at the detachment.

The rain was, if anything, heavier here than it had been in Toronto and she dashed to the front door of the house and let herself in. It was midday quiet and still; a kind of stillness that made her nervous, given what she’d found in her hotel room the day before. It would have been nice to have some company, but her mother and Martha had gone out in the morning and the house was as empty as it sounded.

She popped two pieces of whole-wheat bread into the toaster. To make up for the healthy amount of fibre, she took a half-eaten wheel of Camembert out of the fridge and left it on the counter to temper for a few minutes.

There was nothing of interest in the mail except for a forwarded property tax bill for her house in Pember Lake. Westmuir kept reassessing the house at higher and higher levels and this year had it at $325,000. A similar house less than a kilometre away had sold for $260,000 in January. She didn’t mind paying her taxes – after all, it was tax money that paid her salary – but it made her sick that the county was helping itself to thirty percent extra with its upbeat evaluations. Too bad there wasn’t a law that you could sell your house back to Westmuir for what they claimed it was worth.

The toaster dinged and she cut three big slabs of cheese onto each piece and sat at the kitchen table. She hadn’t realized until now how tired she was. The buzziness of a week without Percocet had finally begun to die down – keeping busy had helped her ignore the jitters during the last few days – and she felt like the world around her was beginning to emit its real colours again. What a strange dream the last two months had been. Living in this house, half out of her mind in pain, depressed, hopeless at times. But now she was sitting at Glynnis Crombie’s – all right, Pedersen’s – kitchen table, in full uniform, thinking about the day ahead of her. She was escaping the immediate present, a state of mind that paid no heed to tomorrow, that hardly believed in it. She was shaking loose the bonds. It seemed to her now that days and weeks lay ahead of her, a topography of tasks and battles and puzzles and outcomes. She realized she felt calm and prepared for the first time since Christmas.

She worked her way through one melting, fragrant piece of toast and was picking up the second when she heard a sound from downstairs. She stilled her hand midway to her mouth and listened. There it was again. Something being pushed around on the floor. And now a voice. Good Christ. She put the toast back down on the plate, picked her chair up to move it silently back, and slipped her reloaded gun from its holster. No one would take it from her now, by god. At the door to the basement, she could hear more clearly now: faint bumps, gentle clattering, a murmur. A woman’s voice, she was fairly certain. She breathed shallowly by the door, her hand wrapping the knob silently, opening it into the dark stairwell. She stepped down, once, twice, stepped over the creaky third step, and then down again, but the fifth step emitted its low groan and she stopped on it, her heart pounding. The sounds from below abruptly stopped. Jesus, she thought. I should have gone around the back and come in through the door with the Glock out. There were footsteps approaching the bottom door. Fucking hell. She brought the gun up to chest height. A high-pitched hum filled her head. Below her, the door opened.

“We have to stop meeting like this.”

“Goddamnit,” Hazel said, lowering the gun and leaning against the wall. “What are you doing down here?”

“You sure you don’t want to shoot me first?” said Martha. She turned sideways to allow her mother to answer her own question. There were boxes opened and in various states of being filled around the room. “Nanna gave me a job.”

Hazel descended the rest of the stairwell into the bedroom. Three finished boxes were closed up and taped shut against the wall by the back door. “I guess you’re in the mood to stick me in a box, huh?”

“You put me out of my house, I put you out of yours.”

“Ah,” said Hazel. “Karma.”

She crossed the room. It looked bigger with boxes of her stuff ranged around it. She didn’t think she and her mother had brought much with them, but Martha was on six boxes and counting. Hazel sat on the bed. “Any chance we can start over?”

“At what point?” said Martha, her fist on her hip. “1971?”

“You really want to redo your whole childhood?”

“Maybe the parts where you somehow communicated to me that I was a screw-up and the world wanted to eat me alive?”

Hazel lowered her head and measured how much further lightheartedness was going to get her. She said, “Some things get lost in translation, Martha. I never thought you were a screw-up, but as for the world part, every mother thinks that. I never meant to make you feel that I was protecting you from yourself.”

Martha tossed a pair of shoes into a box and leaned against the wall, her arms crossed. “So that’s it? I just accept I’ve built my entire world-view on a miscommunication and move on?”

“It wasn’t a miscommunication if it’s what you heard. I should have done a better job of correcting the impression.” She finally looked at her daughter. “But these kinds of things are hard to set straight, Martha. They go off true so gradually that by the time you realize you’re wrong, the error starts to look like you. Do you know what I mean?”

“No.”

“Belief is all we have,” Hazel said. “What we believe doesn’t weigh as much as a gram, but it’s what we are. A wrong belief can ruin everything.”

“You make it sound like you can just switch it off.”

“I know you can’t. It takes time, but you have to start.” Her daughter sighed heavily. “Come sit with me.” There was a pause, but then Martha pushed herself off the wall and came to sit beside Hazel on the bed. “There’s still time, you know. We don’t have to carry on thinking the same old wrong things about each other.”

“What will we think about each other then?”

“Some new wrong things,” Hazel said, and they both smiled. “I’ve only ever wanted you to feel loved. Everything else, no matter how misbegotten, was for that. I can’t promise I’ll be able to stop trying to protect you, Martha, but if you’re able to convince yourself it’s coming out of love and not fear, maybe it won’t feel so toxic to you.”

Martha shrugged. “Maybe.” She looked slantways at her mother. “Where’s this new Zen aspect coming from?” She closed one eye. “Is it the Percocets?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry, but I know about the pills. Nanna told me to keep an eye out for stashes when I packed up. She says you were developing a problem. Is that true?”

Who was protecting whom, Hazel wondered. “No,” she said. “Anyway, I’m off them now. It’s been six whole days.”

“Is it hard?”

She wanted to say no, she wanted to say it was none of her business. But if it was time to change the beliefs, she was going to have to do her part. “Yeah,” she said, at last. “It’s hard. It’s very hard. I still want them.”

“Why?”

She realized she was crying. “I like the way they make me feel, Martha. But I’m not me on them. It’s good that I stopped.”

“So this is really you?”

“I think so.”

Martha shifted a little closer and Hazel hesitantly lifted her arm off the bed and then settled it on the girl’s shoulders and they touched the sides of their heads together, like birds. “We’ll hardly recognize each other now,” Martha said.

Martha said she’d handle the rest of the packing on her own – it was good to have something to do, she said. Upstairs, the Camembert on the second slice of toast had begun to go waxy and Hazel tossed it into the garbage can. She imagined herself rummaging in her own fridge again, and she felt a frisson of excitement that might have had an undercurrent of fear in it as well. To be on her own again. To start over. What would it feel like?

It was one. The phone had not rung and she felt no particular urgency to return to the station. She thought of going back downstairs to have a rest, but she didn’t want to disturb the delicate peace she and Martha had begun to build, and she decided to use her mother’s “room.” The bed was neatly made, and rather than mussing the sheets, she just lay on top of them. Now the sounds from downstairs were even clearer, even under the noise of the rain rattling against the roof; had she listened more closely before unholstering her gun, she would have realized what was happening. She closed her eyes and then opened them and stared at the ceiling. Where was Eldwin? She’d instructed her officers to get their cars out and she had cruisers from Kehoe River, Fort Leonard, and Gilmore parked in various cul-de-sacs, side streets, and rural routes and no one had seen anything. Wherever they were, it had to be a place they knew, somewhere they felt safe, where they knew the lay of the land. But she’d been in Bellocque’s basement and she was sure it was not the site. Unless they were moving Eldwin back and forth to different places. That was a dangerous strategy and it was unlikely that Dana Goodman would ever go back to that ramshackle cottage. No, the most likely thing was that the ex-detective was trying to figure out a way to get rid of Eldwin. They were in endgame and time was running out.

She closed her eyes and began to drift off. The bed felt warm and she sank into it. She could smell the scent of her mother’s hair on the pillow. Her mother’s scent hadn’t changed in all her life; from childhood on, it had always been this perfume of warm flesh and washed hair, it rubbed off on anything her mother touched. Old people were supposed to go sour; Hazel felt that she, herself, was already like a pot of stale-dated yoghurt. But her mother had stayed young in her body somehow.

She began to dream. She was on a beach, alone under the sun. The water was blue and the sand was white. When was the last time she’d felt relaxed? When she’d had time for herself? She picked up a coconut and shook it. It rang. She shook it again and it rang a second time. She opened her eyes. “You going to get that?” Martha called from downstairs and Hazel picked up the extension beside the bed. It was Wingate. Claire Eldwin had come in.

More than Claire Eldwin was waiting for Hazel when she returned to the station house. Constable Childress had appeared at the front desk in a state of considerable distress, demanding to see Hazel. Wilton had kept her in the waiting area, where she’d paced angrily, talking occasionally on her cellphone to someone who seemed as upset as she was. Childress was containable, but when Gordon Sunderland had appeared at one in the afternoon, he added to an already combustible atmosphere. He, too, insisted on seeing Hazel the moment she got back from lunch. And when, at one-thirty, Mrs. Eldwin arrived, Wilton began to think he should lock the front doors.

Melanie intercepted Hazel at the back entrance. “How do you want to handle all this?”

“Put Childress in my office, Sunderland in interview 1, and put Claire Eldwin in 2 with Wingate.”

She stepped back in the corridor and waited to hear people moving about and doors shutting. No way she wanted to be in the middle of this bee swarm. If these people wanted each to tear her a new one, they were going to have to do it in an orderly fashion.

Childress’s news was going to be the most important. She took a deep breath outside her office, and then opened the door confidently. Childress wasn’t even sitting. She stood by the window, staring at the door, her eyes wild. She spoke in a whisper. “Are you crazy?”

“I gather your boss got my package.”

“You don’t send the chief of the biggest division in Toronto a human hand to his desk.”

“Where does he like to take delivery of such things?”

“He threw up. Into the box.”

“That sounds like he’s taking it more seriously now.”

“You better think twice before you ever go back to Toronto.”

Hazel went around the desk and stood behind it, leaning on the blotter. “Look, I don’t care if Ilunga shat his pants, Constable. I want to know what he’s doing. Is he doing anything? Or is he still in denial?”

Childress sighed, as if it gave her pain to even speak. “He ordered the removal of the boat and its oars. He told me to tell you he’s charging the whole thing to OPSC. All due respect, but he asked me to repeat this verbatim to you. He says after they get the bill, he hopes they string you up.”

“That’s nice. When do we hear back?”

“They’re working on it now.”

“Childress? When will I know?”

“Tomorrow morning. At the earliest.”

“Go back to your B &B and wait for word,” she said.

“He told me to come back to Toronto.” She hadn’t looked up at Hazel again, too afraid to see the look in her eyes. “I’m to leave right after speaking to you.”

Hazel pressed her intercom. “Melanie? Send in Constable Jenner.”

Jenner appeared within a minute.

“Jenner? Accompany Constable Childress to The River Nook and install yourself in the hallway to ensure she doesn’t leave.”

“You can’t hold me,” said Childress, angrily.

“You’re seconded to me until this investigation is completed. That’s how I’ve decided to interpret Superintendent Ilunga’s agreeing to get you to drive me here. So you are under my command until further notice.”

“You can’t do that.”

“I just did.”

Childress stood up, passing a look behind her to Jenner. “He’s going to make you a personal hobby,” she said. “I’ll stay. You don’t need to send me a babysitter.”

“Do I have your word?”

Her mouth was set in a straight line. “My word is worth something. You have it.”

After she went out, Hazel said, “Call Dianne MacDonald and ask her to let us know if Childress tries to leave the building.” Jenner nodded smartly and left.

Next was Sunderland. His hair was flat against his forehead where the weather had plastered it down. He’d prepared a presentation, laying out the last two weeks of the Westmuir Record on the tabletop. When she entered the room, he was standing behind the table and he made an expansive gesture at them. “Ah, here she is, Shiva the destroyer. And look, here is her handiwork. Five numbers of our proud paper of record, reduced to a high school ’zine.” He came around the front of the table. “You are feckless, power-hungry, thoughtless, arrogant, and foolish, you know that?”

“How was Atlanta?”

“I’m going to make you front-page news, Hazel. I’m going to tell all our readers what you consider fair game. That you think strong-arming anyone you care to into doing your will is the way to run the Port Dundas P.D. I’m thinking of maybe doing a summer-length exposé. ‘The Rot at the Heart of Westmuir.’”

“If you’re thinking of ruining me, you’d better get in line. You have competitors.”

“They can go on the record. I know I won’t have any trouble finding them.”

She peered down at the five newspapers arrayed on the table. She’d probably had more to do with their contents than Sunderland had. She pushed them apart with her hands. “You know what’s wrong with your paper, Gord?”

He set his jaw. “That it’s within a five-minute walk of the station house? And that members of this police force have, for years, been using it as their own personal bulletin board?”

“No,” she said patiently, “it’s that it’s run as a cult of personality. Which would be fine if you had a personality, or if you had any competition. If the people had a choice of what to read.”

His cheeks were shaking and she thought there was a very good chance he might sweep the papers off the table that separated them and crawl over it to wrap his fingers around her throat. She sort of relished the thought of it, calling for backup, someone being forced to use their truncheon to pull him off her. “I’m going to be here long after you, Hazel. But I’ll promise you one thing: I’ll keep your name alive.”

He made to pick up the papers, but thought twice of it and walked around the table. “I’ll close these doors so tight to you, Gord, that when you print news about Port Dundas, you’ll have to put it beside the horoscope.” He stopped. “Why don’t you think for once? You’ve been running a short story that was probably penned, in part, by a murderer. The Record is actually part of the story this time. And if you want to find out how it ends, you’ll change your tone.”

“Oh yeah, and what is it, exactly, you can do for me? You going to write the editorial apologizing for the dog’s breakfast we’ve been putting out the last two and a half weeks? You going to refund the people who actually pay to read this newspaper?”

“No,” she said. “But if you can keep it in your pants, Sunderland, I may be able to help you save face.”

He screwed up that round, fratboy’s face at her and she thought maybe he’d spit. But instead, he was at a loss for words. She had rarely seen him like that and it told her he needed her much more than she needed him.

“I know about Ray Greene,” he said. “That’s going into Monday’s paper.”

“You want a comment from me?”

“I’ll do without.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” she said. “You hold the Monday edition and I’ll give you the end of this Eldwin story before the weekend is out. It’ll be something special, unlike any other kind of story you’ve run before. It’ll make you look like a genius. Haven’t you always wanted to be confused for a genius?”

“I’m finished talking to you, Hazel.”

He made for the door. “You know the Toronto Star is going to pick this up,” she lied. “It has a Toronto angle. You’re going to need a slam dunk if the Record isn’t going to look like it’s reprinting a wire story from the Big Smoke.”

“I detest you,” he said.

“I like your tan,” she said.

She stood in the hallway outside of interview 2, hoping not to hear screams. She could see the back of Wingate’s head. She prayed he was taking the initiative and starting without her. She dreaded this, but she straightened her cap and went in.