Blackfly Season

32

CARDINAL WAS SITTING AT THE COUNTER in D’Anunzio’s, a combination fruit store and soda fountain that had been an Algonquin Bay landmark since before he was born. D’Anunzio’s made the best sandwiches in town, which was why he was there. He had finished his chicken salad bagel in no time, but he remained at the old wooden counter making notes.

Cardinal had long ago ceased to believe in inspiration. He had even ceased to believe in his own cleverness. He did not acknowledge in himself any particular investigative talent. A successful investigation, he had come to believe, was simply a matter of putting in the time. You weren’t a genius, you weren’t Sherlock Holmes, you were a more or less effective part of an organization that devoted itself to covering all the angles of a crime until it was cleared.

So when he first had this whatever-you-called-inspiration-when-you-didn’t-believe-in-inspiration, he tossed it aside as an unproductive notion. Too easy, he figured. Too unlikely.

He was making notes on how they should pursue the biker angle. He still had nothing solid to hang Wombat’s murder on them. Call Musgrave, he had written. Get more background on VR. And Call Jerry Commanda. He crossed out Check reverse directory.

That was one task he had completed. The CID kept reverse telephone directories for all major Canadian cities, not just Algonquin Bay. Cardinal had looked up the Vancouver number Terri had dialled from the hospital, but it wasn’t listed. Then he’d called Vancouver directory assistance, which also had no listing. The young man on the other end of the line had informed him that it was a cellphone number.

Next, he’d called Bell Security and told them it was an emergency, explaining that a young woman had been shot and he was trying to notify next of kin. All Bell would tell him was that the number belonged to one Kevin Tait. They had no address for him because he paid for service using prepaid cards and, no, they could not tell him why the number was currently not in service. Most likely, the customer had run out of minutes on his card. Any further information would require a warrant.

A warrant would take a couple of hours, and Cardinal had not wanted to spend a couple of hours on that particular angle just then. So what had he learned? Terri Tait had called her brother’s cellphone. Not exactly earthshaking stuff. There was no reason to suppose Kevin Tait was anywhere other than Vancouver. Then again, it was a cellphone; he could be anywhere.

Cardinal’s next move had been a computer check of national criminal records. It turned out that Kevin Tait, twenty-two, had been convicted of possession of heroin with intent to traffic three years previously, for which he had been sentenced to two years less a day.

A call to the Vancouver police came up empty; the arresting officer had transferred to another jurisdiction, and no one was able or willing to help Cardinal right then. He’d left his name and number with a detective on their drug squad who promised to get back to him.

All right, Kevin Tait, where are you? Cardinal added several question marks in his notebook. Another thought was pushing its way to the forefront of his mind. What if Terri Tait is not a stranger here? What if she was not coming to Algonquin Bay for the first time? What if she was returning here? This was the inspiration he was trying to resist. Was such a scenario even likely? If Terri Tait grew up here, someone surely would have reported her missing by now. But maybe she hadn’t lived here for very long.

Back in the squad room, Cardinal put in a call to the Nipissing School Board. School records are confidential; strictly speaking, a warrant is required. But it’s different from dealing with a huge corporation like Bell. Sometimes a certain flexibility can soften these situations; it depends who you get on the other end of the line. In this case, it was a young woman—a young woman with a lot of sandpaper in her voice, as if she’d recently left off screaming. Cardinal’s first question met with a raspy but firm no.

“I understand your reluctance,” Cardinal said. “In fact, I admire it. We need people like you to make sure information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.”

“So why don’t you get a warrant and try again later?” the woman said.

“Well, of course I could do that. But it would take a lot of time and I don’t want to go to all that trouble only to find out that you don’t have any information. So—without giving me anything personal—I wonder if you could just confirm whether or not a Miss Terri Tait ever attended school here.”

“Just confirmation. You don’t want grades or anything?”

“No, no. I would never ask for anything like that without a warrant.” Thinking, I’m such a liar, I should have gone into acting. “If you could just tell me if Terri Tait ever attended school here or not, I’d really appreciate it.”

There was a pause on the Nipissing School Board’s end of the line. Even in that vacant line tone, Cardinal thought he detected a distinct rasp.

“How are you spelling that name again?”

“Terri Tait,” Cardinal said, and spelled it out. Luckily the spellings were slightly unusual.

He was put on hold. Cardinal twirled through his Rolodex, looking for the number for the separate school board. He would call them next.

The young woman came back on the line.

“Yes, a Terri Tait attended Ojibwa High School back in the early nineties. She was with them for two years, grades nine and ten.”

Bingo, Cardinal thought. We’re on a roll.

“And her parents?”

“Wing Commander Kenneth Tait. Spouse, Marilyn. Oh, my. There’s a note on the file that says they were killed in a plane crash—a private plane—in 1993. The kids went to live with relatives out west.”

“I’m wondering about their Algonquin Bay address,” Cardinal said. “You said the father was in the air force. Can you tell me, did they live on the base or off?”

“I wouldn’t know. Last address we have is 145 Deloraine Drive.”

On the base.

“How’d Terri do in math and chemistry?” He wanted to leave this young woman feeling she’d done a good job.

“Really, Detective, you can’t expect me to give you information like that without a warrant. You’ll have to get a court order.”

“Of course,” Cardinal said. “I’ll do that right now.”

He hung up and grabbed his jacket. His phone was ringing but he ignored it and headed straight out the door.

The residents of Algonquin Bay don’t like to think so, but it’s all too probable that the city’s best years are behind it. At their peak in the middle of the last century, there were three railway lines running through town; now there is one. The CNR station burned down a few years back, a shame because it was one of the few buildings in this four-square town with real character. And the former CPR station, a classic limestone structure on Oak Street, is being transformed into a railway museum. Only the former ONR station is still in operation—but as offices, not as a terminal.

The Cold War had also been very good to Algonquin Bay. Canada had beefed up its armed forces and joined the United States in NORAD, a system of linked radar installations and air force bases designed to intercept any threat coming in over the ice cap from Russia. By the mid-sixties, the local air force base boasted three thousand personnel and an arsenal of nuclear-tipped Bomarc missiles. The defence department hollowed out a mountain next to Trout Lake and installed a three-storey radar outfit inside it, a Dr. Strangelove set that at one time had been cutting edge.

But the Cold War had ended. The missiles were disarmed and then dismantled. The armed forces were downsized, and one by one the squadrons mothballed. That left only about 150 military personnel in Algonquin Bay, and no one seemed to know how much longer they’d be there.

Cardinal drove up to the base checkpoint. Sometimes the checkpoint was manned, sometimes not; it depended on the current level of threat. Today it was unmanned, and Cardinal drove through without even slowing. It made him wonder about his country’s state of readiness.

Cardinal was acting on one little-considered result of the vanished squadrons: empty houses. No one talked much about the empty houses, and the military wasn’t about to publicize them. To put them on the market would destroy the value of all the other homes in town. So, unbeknownst to most of its population, Algonquin Bay contains enough empty houses to fill a subdivision, which is exactly what the air base looks like.

The only difference between the air base and other sixties-era subdivisions is that all its houses are not just similar but identical: ranch-style split-levels with two-car garages and sunken living rooms. The streets look the same, too—all drives, lanes, circles and courts with spurious curves and dead ends apparently designed to frustrate the Soviet invader.

Cardinal had thought he knew where Deloraine Drive was, but it turned out he didn’t. After he passed the same crooked stop sign for the third time, he pulled over onto the shoulder. There was a solitary man coming up the road on the other side, dressed in the Canada Post summer outfit of white short-sleeved shirt and blue shorts. The man was engaged in an idiosyncratic form of locomotion. He stopped every three or four steps and reared back in a rocking motion, left hand fingering the invisible fretboard of an invisible guitar.

If anyone had earned the right to play air guitar, Cardinal figured, it was Spike Willis. Spike had been a little ahead of him in school, and since the age of sixteen had always been in the best rock bands Algonquin Bay had produced. He had done his stint in Toronto in the seventies, changed bands every year, released a lot of recordings and pretty quickly developed a reputation for making his battered Telecaster talk. Then he threw it all over to come back to Algonquin Bay and raise a family. Why, Cardinal never knew. Nor did he know Spike well enough to ask. All he knew was that Spike Willis played the kind of blues guitar that can make grown men cry.

He called him over.

“Oh, shit. I surrender, Officer.” Spike threw his hands up with a big grin. He had always struck Cardinal as one of nature’s few truly happy men.

“You know, I grew up in this town,” Cardinal said. “And I’ve been back now for about twelve years. So how the hell is it possible that I’m lost?”

“Oh, hell, everyone gets lost up here,” Spike said. He hitched his mail sack higher and waved away a blackfly, his good nature apparently insect-proof. “I grew up right here on the base and I’ll tell you something. True story. One night after I’d had a few—well, more than a few, really—I came home, opened the door, went inside and suddenly realized my entire family had moved out of town. Mom, Dad, Sis: all gone. Some other family had moved into my house and changed all the furniture. Even the aquarium was gone. It was like I was the victim of a magic trick. I couldn’t believe my eyes.”

“You’d staggered into the wrong house?”

“I had the wrong house. And I lived here, man. Isn’t that too much? What are you looking for?”

Cardinal told him, and Spike gave him the directions.

“How many of these houses are actually empty?”

“Oh, geez. Tons of ’em. I don’t even need the mail cart up here any more.”

“They don’t look empty.”

“No, the military keeps ’em looking sharp. They figure once they start to go, the whole place’ll cave in. Probably right, too.”

“What about Deloraine, is it a ghost town?”

“Not really. They haven’t let any one street get completely empty. They rent the houses out, you know. Pretty low rents, from what I hear.”

“You notice anything unusual on Deloraine?”

“Nope. Same old, same old.”

“Okay, thanks. Where you playing next?” Cardinal said.

“Toad Hall, two Saturdays from now.”

“I’ll try to be there.”

“Do that. Got a guest vocalist. Black babe can really wail.”

Spike headed off down the road, rocking and tilting, sending another blistering—if silent—solo up to the wide blue sky.

Deloraine Drive proved to be a cul-de-sac. Cardinal parked in a cramped turning circle and walked over to number 145, the last split-level in a row of three. The grass was trimmed and the porch swept, everything shipshape as Spike had said. The blinds were lowered, but there was no other indication that the house was vacant.

Cardinal walked up to the front door. It was still on the latch and did not appear to have been tampered with. The sliding sections of the front picture window were also unmarked. He stepped down onto the lawn and checked the front window of what would be the master bedroom. The dust was thick along the ledge, and undisturbed.

He went around to the back and saw that one of the basement windows had been broken, just enough to reach inside and slide it open. Cardinal knelt on the grass and a blackfly bit his ear. He slapped at it and cursed. He slid the window open, turned around and backed into it, lowering himself to the basement floor.

It was only a half-basement; just big enough for the washer and dryer, which were still there. He lifted the lid of the washer. Empty. In fact, the entire basement was empty and smelled of nothing except concrete.

He went up the stairs and pushed open the door; it opened onto the kitchen. The fridge and stove were still there, but the kitchen was otherwise empty. He stood there for a minute and absorbed the emptiness of the place. Not the emptiness of a house between rentals but the desolation of a place that had once been home to many and was now nothing more than bricks and wood and stale air. He could almost hear the voices of children, the adult voices of old arguments, ancient apologies. He could almost smell the thousands of dinners that had been cooked on that Kenmore stove.

The sink was wet. Someone had turned the water on and used it quite recently. Cardinal opened the cupboard underneath it and found a paper bag with nothing in it except an apple core and a banana peel not yet black.

He walked quickly into the living/dining area. There were places where the dust had obviously been disturbed. He went up the half-flight of stairs. Nothing in the bathroom, nothing in the master bedroom. But in the smaller bedroom he found fingermarks on the blinds where someone had lifted them. He opened the folding doors of the closet, but there were just a couple of hangers, bearing the ghostly shapes of dry cleaning plastic.

He stepped into the hallway and looked up at the square in the ceiling that led to the attic. He knew the attics in these places. They were tiny, airless spaces full of fibreglass insulation and not much else, big enough to store a few suitcases. You needed a ladder or a high stool to reach them, and the square looked undisturbed.

He went downstairs again and opened the front closet. Empty. He stood in the tiny vestibule, wondering what to do next. All units were on the lookout for an AWOL patient with red hair, but the blue hooded T-shirt would hide that. Then he noticed the cupboard under the stairs and for a moment was flooded with memories.

When he was about nine years old, he had been best friends with a boy named Tommy Brown who lived up here at the base. His house had been identical to this one, and the two of them had had great fun hiding in that crawl space, telling Twilight Zone stories and in general trying to scare the hell out of each other. Tommy used to bring his collie, Tango, in there with them, and the space would reek of dog breath.

Cardinal stepped up to the little door. The bolt was open. He pulled on the handle and the door swung outward. He got down on one knee and looked inside. In the shadows of the back corner, he could just make out the frightened, pale features of Terri Tait.