The Taken

31

Claire Eldwin’s face was streaked red and white, her hands wrapped tightly around a water glass. On the table between them was the cage with the mouse in it.

“What’s that mouse doing here?” Hazel asked Wingate.

“I just… she was crying. I thought an animal might calm her down.”

She sat at the end of the table. Mason was sniffing the air. “Did it?”

“No,” said Claire Eldwin. “Is it true the man who kidnapped my husband sent this poor animal in a box to you?”

Hazel hesitated; she didn’t know if Eldwin knew about her husband’s hand. “Yes,” she said. “He did. It wasn’t… very nice. But he’s okay now.”

“Who?”

“The mouse. Mason.”

Claire Eldwin put her hand out toward the cage and put a finger between the bars. Mason pushed himself up against an opposite corner. “This is my husband,” she said. “In a cage somewhere.” She looked up at Hazel and began to cry again. “I take back everything I ever said about him… I just want him home. Why haven’t you found him?”

“We’re close, Mrs. Eldwin. We are. We have… we know the man who abducted him.”

“You know who he is, or you have him? Which is it?” She was quivering as if someone had run an electric current through her.

“We don’t have him. Either of them, actually. Brenda Cameron’s mother is involved as well. They believe Colin killed Brenda. Murdered her.”

“Colin would never have laid a hand on anyone. Not that way.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Eldwin, but I’m not sure now. In my line of work we see, time and again, that people don’t really know those closest to them.”

“I know Colin.”

“I feel terrible about the situation he’s in, but I still don’t know what to think. Is there anything you haven’t told us? About your life together in Toronto, about the night Brenda Cameron died? You told the police Colin was home with you, but did you notice anything strange? Was he behaving in a manner different than usual?”

Claire Eldwin’s face had hardened. “These people abduct Colin, and your way of finding my husband is by investigating their claims?”

“It’s been impossible to do it any other way.”

“Colin’s done nothing. You’ll see. He’s not necessarily a good person, but he’s not a murderer. At heart, he’s a coward and he looks for the easy way out. Killing a girl? He could never have done it.”

“Did you know Brenda Cameron?”

“No.”

“We’re not sure she was alone in that boat.”

“Colin was at home with me all that night. The police questioned him, you know. They came to the house and questioned him. You should know all this.”

“I know it,” said Hazel.

“Then what are you doing to get him home?”

“Everything we can.”

Claire Eldwin searched Wingate’s face, hoping to find reassurance there, but she came up empty. Quietly, she said, “What’s ‘everything’?”

She’d decided to spare Claire Eldwin the details for now. She already looked like she was going to faint. “Everything,” repeated Hazel.

They led her down the back hall that passed behind the pen and Wingate showed her out of the station house. Hazel took him aside and asked him to follow her and make sure she got home. He went to his cruiser and followed Eldwin out of the parking lot. Hazel watched them pass through the rain down Porter Street on their way toward the highway, Claire Eldwin hunched over her steering wheel, her eyes blank. The woman had already seen too much, Hazel thought, and now there was this, an uncertainty more awful than any she’d experienced with her husband before now. She watched the two cars moving off toward the house in Mulhouse Springs.

She went back to her office and sat behind her desk. She checked the website one more time, but the camera had been turned off and the site returned a black square, a fitting monument to the entire case. It had been a case about faith, bad faith and broken hearts. She wondered silently to herself how often in the last ten days images of love destroyed had passed through her mind, her own hopeless love for Andrew, the broken marriage that was Colin and Claire Eldwin, Wingate’s murdered partner, the unimaginable sadness that had driven Joanne Cameron to tie the last of her hopes to a rogue cop who probably loved nothing but his own convictions. She realized that she’d allowed herself to think of the relationship between Bellocque and Paritas as a sort of silver lining for Joanne Cameron: someone to love in the midst of her grief. But as soon as she had that thought, she recognized that it, too, was a lie: the affair between the two of them was strictly business. Cameron had been right all along insisting he wasn’t her boyfriend.

For some reason, this thought ticked over into an image of Wingate following Claire Eldwin home, the both of them driving slowly, like a cortege without a body. She fixated on the image of the two cars, and in her mind’s eye, she saw two other cars… She fumbled for her notebook and read through her notes from the Barlow and Paritas interviews. Barlow had mentioned her clients had arrived in separate cars and Paritas – Cameron – had confirmed it when she’d angrily denied that she and Bellocque lived together. She should have paid much more attention to that denial: they didn’t live together, they had never been lovers, and now she realized it was important. She hurriedly got Wingate on the radio. “Come back,” she said.

“I’m not in Mulhouse Springs yet.”

“I know where Colin Eldwin is being held.”