Blood is the Sky

Chapter Twenty-Six

Maskwa and I spent the next four hours at the lodge, telling our story over and over to several different constables. Staff Sergeant Moreland was there, of course, and as he listened to me go over the whole thing one more time, he had a look on his face like he wished I had never set foot in Ontario. Not that I could blame him. As I watched him standing over the body by the stairs, it occurred to me he was probably near retirement himself. For all I knew, he and DeMers had been making plans to go fishing together when they had both hung it up. Now DeMers was dead. DeMers and Gannon and Tom LeBlanc and four men from Detroit were dead, and now there were two more.

I saw Boxer Face and Suntan standing there for a moment, looking down at the other body, the one by the shed, and I saw a couple other constables who had kept guard over me in the medical center. The one person I didn’t see was Natalie Reynaud. When I asked the sergeant where she was, he told me she was back at the detachment and left it at that. Then he told me to go home and to wait by my phone in case he needed me for more questions. Aside from that, he didn’t want to ever see me or hear from me again.

When we were finally in my truck, I took my last look at the lodge and then turned the ignition. “Come on, Maskwa,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

I turned the truck around and headed out the gravel road. A minute later, we passed the sedan, its front wheels off the road.

“This wasn’t the best way to do this,” I said.

Maskwa looked over at me. “What do you mean?”

“Setting the trap so far from the lodge. You gave them a chance to regroup.”

He looked back out the window. “It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. We were going to take Helen to the lodge, get her settled in there, and then come back out. Those guys would have never made it out of the car.”

“Did they get here too soon?”

He shrugged. “Vinnie misjudged how much of a lead we had.”

“Why not just leave her at your house?”

“She wouldn’t let us do that.”

“I wouldn’t have given her the choice.”

“You weren’t there, Alex.”

I shook my head and kept driving. We hit the main highway, took a left, and headed east, toward the reserve.

“You saw what they did to Helen’s friends,” Maskwa said. “I didn’t see it myself, you’ve got to understand that. Vinnie just told me about it. But you were there in the house.”

“Yes.”

“Did they really burn them alive?”

I hesitated as the scene came back to me. “It looked like they were still alive, yes.”

“They would have done the same to Helen. They were coming for her. We weren’t going to let her out of our sight.”

“So why did Vinnie come up here?” I said. “And why did he come alone?”

“He told me he didn’t want to drag you up here again.”

I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. “Yeah, he’ll hear about that one later.”

“Vinnie called me,” he said. “He was driving right by the reserve. It was a spur of the moment thing.”

That hit me in the gut. Spur of the moment or not, when Vinnie needed help, he chose one of his own people again. Not me.

Maskwa seemed to pick up on it. “It was too late to call you,” he said. “He needed help and I was right here.”

I didn’t say anything. I kept driving. I turned onto the road to Calstock, passing the sawmill and the power plant, then the spot in the woods where we had found the Suburban. The crime scene tape was gone now. There was no trace of what had happened here.

We drove past the sign welcoming us to the Constance Lake Reserve. The lake appeared on our left, and then the road to Maskwa’s house. Vinnie’s truck was parked outside.

When we pulled in, Guy and his mother both came out of their house next door. It was a cold and bitter day and they were walking with their heads down, Guy’s mother in a housecoat with her arms wrapped around her chest, and Guy in his baseball jacket. They joined us in Maskwa’s living room, all six of us in that one small room. Maskwa threw some more wood into his stove.

“How did it go?” Vinnie asked. He was sitting in the back corner, farthest away from the fire. Helen was on the couch, watching the fire through the glass door on the stove.

“We got through it,” I said. “They want to know where you and Helen are.”

“I imagine.”

“We told them we didn’t know.”

“Thank you.”

I was just about to ask when the explanations would begin, but then I found a measure of patience for the first time in my life. I kept my mouth shut and sat down.

Maskwa made coffee, and the rest of us sat there in silence. Finally, Vinnie took out a folded piece of paper from his pocket and gave it to me. Helen didn’t look at me. She didn’t move.

I unfolded the paper and read it. It was a reprint from the Detroit News, dated January 21, 1985. The headline read “Death Toll in Hotel Fire Grows to 27.”

I glanced up at Helen. She had her hands clasped tight together in her lap.

The picture. It showed the burned-out remains of a building, a hotel on Warren Avenue, near Wayne State University. It was a grainy black-and-white photo, made even grainier in the reprint. It looked like something from a hundred years ago.

The story itself started out with two more people dying at the hospital, plus another person who had not been included in the initial count. Most of the dead were Canadians. A junior high school class had come down from Sudbury to take part in a choral concert at the college. Nineteen of the dead were students.

I looked up at Helen again. She kept staring at the fire. Something came to me then, something she had said to me at the lodge.

No kids. None of them had kids. Helen, Hank, Ron, and Millie-it was what they all had in common. The strange gloom that was hanging over the lodge when we got there-it occurred to me now that it wasn’t just because they were closing down the business. There was a much bigger reason.

I went back to the article. The fire had started next door, in a dry cleaner’s. It had spread into the hotel. There was some question about the sprinkler system in the old hotel, and the fire exits. An investigation was underway.

I looked at the date on the article again. I thought back to January of 1985. That was right in the middle of my lost year, the year after my partner and I were gunned down in that apartment building on Woodward, the year after my marriage ended and I left the police force. I remembered the fire, but only vaguely. It was just something on the front page of the newspaper.

The last paragraph was a long list, each name followed by an age and a home town. I scanned through the names. I found Stephanie Gannon, 13, Sudbury. I found Melissa St. Jean, 13, Sudbury. I found Brett Trembley, 13, Sudbury, and Barry Trembley, 13, Sudbury.

This time when I looked up at Helen she cleared her throat and spoke. “Now you know,” she said. She didn’t look at me.

Maskwa handed me a hot cup of coffee. He sat down next to Guy’s mother. Guy was sitting on the floor next to Vinnie. They were all watching the flames in the wood stove.

“I wasn’t there,” she said. “Hank wasn’t there. Ron and Millie weren’t there. The kids wanted to go by themselves. Just their friends and a couple of chaperones. They were so excited.”

She looked down at the cup in her hands. She didn’t drink from it.

“Melissa and Stephanie were best friends. They were in that room together. They were planning on going to college together. They were going to be bridesmaids for each other.”

She swallowed hard.

“At least they were together when they died,” she said. “They had that much.”

There was silence in the room for a while.

“They say the smoke gets you first,” she finally said. “They say you never feel the fire itself. You don’t even wake up. But it started at midnight. That’s the thing. In a hotel room by themselves for the first time, there’s no way those two kids would have been sleeping at midnight.”

A single tear ran down her cheek.

“Afterward, we’d all get together once a week. All the parents. Sort of like a support group. We’d try to help each other. After about a year, people started to drop out of the group. It was time to move on, they said. It was time to stop dwelling on it. That’s what one woman said to me. It’s not healthy, she said. You’ve got to let go.”

Another long silence. The wood crackled in the stove.

“She had another child. That’s why she said that. She had somebody else. We didn’t. We had nobody. Maybe it was unhealthy, holding on to each other like that. All these years. But we were all we had. Nobody else could understand. I couldn’t be with somebody else, somebody who didn’t know how it felt. So we stayed together.”

She wiped her nose with her hand.

“Claude tried to look after us,” she said. It took me a second to realize who she was talking about now. “As much as he was grieving himself, losing his daughter, I think he felt responsible for us.”

Claude. I looked back down at the article, scanned the list of names. I didn’t see anyone named DeMers.

“Her name was Olivia Markel,” Helen said. “That was her married name. She was the music teacher.”

I found the name. Olivia Markel, 27, Sudbury.

“Claude found out about the investigation,” she said. “He had a friend, a detective down in Detroit.”

I skimmed through the article again. “The hotel,” I said. “The sprinklers and the fire exits.”

“No,” she said. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“No?”

“The dry cleaner’s next door,” she said. “They were trying to put an arson case together. I guess it’s a hard thing to do. Especially a place like that, with all the chemicals… It’s not enough to prove that it was set intentionally. You have to prove that the owners did it themselves, or paid somebody else to do it.”

“The owners-”

“Red Albright. And his little gang. There were five of them. They owned a lot of businesses back then. The dry cleaner’s wasn’t doing so well, so they burned it down. That’s what happened. The police couldn’t prove it. But that’s what happened.”

“I’m not getting some of this,” I said. “I’m sorry. How did they get up here, all these years later?”

She shook her head. “Claude shouldn’t have told us about the investigation. I know he regretted it ever since. The way it just kept eating at us… Especially Hank. It was driving him crazy. He was going to go after them himself, he said. For a while, it was all he ever thought about. When we all bought the lodge together, he used to sit there by the fireplace… This was the fireplace you saw, the one he never let anybody build a fire in.”

I saw the empty fireplace in my mind. I heard the moaning sound it made when the wind rushed over the chimney.

“He’d sit there,” she said, “and try to come up with the best way to get those men, every one of them. He knew he could find them. He knew he could go down there and ring their doorbells and see their faces. It was just… what to do next. I thought I finally convinced him, he’d just ruin his life, what was left of it. Or whatever life we might be able to have together. I thought he was getting over it. Finally, I thought maybe he had let it go. And then they called us, just like that. Albright himself. This man. This voice on the phone. Back when our phone was working. He called us.”

“Of all the places to go hunting in Canada,” I said, “they called you?”

“They got tired of hunting deer and they wanted to try something bigger. They heard there were some good moose lakes up here, and there aren’t that many lodges left. Ours just happened to be the one they chose. After all these years, just when I thought Hank was getting to be himself again… He told me it was just a twist of fate. But that maybe it was supposed to work out that way. Like God sent them up here. He actually said that. Like we were finally being given the chance to see the men who killed our children.”

I knew it wasn’t that simple. They may have burned down their business, whether they had been charged for it or not. The fire spread into the hotel, which may or may not have been up to fire codes. It was a whole chain of events that might have turned out a hundred different ways. But I wasn’t going to say that to her.

“I know what you must be thinking. I know how it sounds. But you can’t understand what it feels like until it happens to you. I’d have dreams about my daughter. About the fire. I couldn’t get to her.”

Her voice was ragged now.

“I can’t make you understand,” she said. “The dreams-”

We heard the rumble of a car passing by outside. The sound got farther and farther away, and then it was quiet again.

“When those men got here, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was afraid to even look at them. But Hank, my God, he was out there shaking their hands, looking each one of them in the eyes. If I had done that-”

She stopped. She looked back at Vinnie.

“If I had done that, I might have seen your brother. I might have known he wasn’t one of them. I might have seen that he didn’t belong.”

Vinnie didn’t say anything. The light from the fire was reflected in his eyes.

Five men. That’s all Hank had seen. Albright and his business associates.

Five men.

“Hank flew them out to Lake Agawaatese. It’s the farthest away. There aren’t even many moose up there. Just bears.”

She kept looking at Vinnie.

“I didn’t know, Vinnie.” She said it like she was still trying to convince him. “I didn’t know what he was going to do.”

“You knew he was going to kill them,” Vinnie said.

“Vinnie-”

“How could you not know? All of you.”

“Ron knew. He was there with Hank, out at the lake. He and Hank… They were there. They did it together. And then Ron and Hank took the Suburban out that morning, the morning they were supposed to have flown back. They took the Suburban and Hank’s truck, I mean, and left the Suburban in the woods. I didn’t know at the time. I wasn’t there. Hank told us to go away, me and Millie. We came back that Saturday. The Suburban was gone. At first I thought-”

“What?”

“I thought the men were gone. I thought maybe… I don’t know… maybe they didn’t do anything. Maybe they flew them back. Then Hank told me. It’s done, he said. That’s what he said to me. It’s done.”

“You knew, Helen.”

She picked her hands up out of her lap. She held them up for a moment and then let them drop again.

“Yes,” she said, in a voice so low I could barely hear her. “Yes, I knew.”

“What about DeMers?”

“He didn’t even know those men were up here. Not until after. They came out to the lodge, Claude and his partner-what was her name?”

“Reynaud,” I said. “Natalie Reynaud.”

“They came out here that morning, when the call came up from Detroit about the missing men. That’s when Hank took him aside and told him what had happened. I thought Claude would strangle him.”

“What was he going to do about it?” I said. “He was a police officer.”

“Yes, and he had taken an oath. He said that to Hank. He had to turn us in. All of us. But then-”

“What?”

“He didn’t. He just didn’t.”

I thought about DeMers, about the way he had treated us. The hot and cold act, and everything he had said and done to convince us to go home and to stay there. It all made sense now. It was tearing him up. And the two of us digging around up here was the last thing in the world he had wanted.

“What about later?” I said. “When he flew up there with Hank?”

“I was there when Claude came over. He didn’t have his partner this time. He said that you and Vinnie had flown up to the lake, and that you were still up there. Hank got his rifle and tried to put it in the plane, and Claude asked him what the hell he was doing. Hank said he’d have to take care of things if you and Vinnie had found out what he and Ron had done. Claude told him that wasn’t going to happen. They were going to fly up and bring the two of you back. And if you had found out, then we’d all just have to deal with it.”

She looked back at Vinnie again.

“Claude said there was already one innocent man dead. He wasn’t going to let it happen to two more.”

Vinnie nodded his head once.

“I swear to God,” Helen said. “I thought that was going to be the end of it. I thought Claude would take care of it and it would all be over. But Hank must have sneaked that rifle onto the plane somehow. They flew up there… And Hank, he must have-”

She started crying.

“He was protecting us,” she said. “That goddamned fool. He didn’t want any of this to touch us. Now he’s gone. Claude is gone. Ron and Millie are gone. Everybody’s gone except me.”

Maskwa got up from his chair and went to her. He stood over her and gently placed one hand to the side of her face. Vinnie stayed in the corner. He was looking up at the ceiling now, blinking away the tears.

“You weren’t coming up here for revenge,” Maskwa said. “You came up here to help them.”

“I had my friend at the News run their names,” Vinnie said. “It was so easy to find that article. I knew it would be just as easy for anybody else. Alex was there when Albright’s brother stopped us. He saw the look in his eyes. And the way they both seemed to think about it, like they had some idea… I knew they’d find them sooner or later.”

“Would you have done the same for Ron?” I said. “If you had gotten to him in time?”

He closed his eyes. “It has to stop somewhere, Alex. Okay? Those kids died in that fire. Hank and Ron, they killed Albright and those other men. And my brother with them. They burned them up. So Albright’s brother came up to kill some more. More fire. More goddamned fire, Alex. What am I supposed to do? Go burn some more of them?”

Maskwa kept his hand on Helen’s face. Vinnie opened his eyes again and watched the two of them.

“No more,” Vinnie said. “This is where it ends. Helen has to go away. She has to go somewhere where they won’t find her.”

“I know where we can go,” Maskwa said. “I can get the plane ready.”

I didn’t have to ask what they were talking about. I knew there were a dozen places they could take her, like maybe Moosonee, on James Bay. Once she was there, she could either go to one of the other reserves on the Ontario side of James Bay, or take the ferry over to Quebec.

Nobody would ever find her. Not the police. Not the men from Detroit.

I knew Vinnie had done this once before. A woman was in trouble and he took her into his family, a family that extended for thousands of miles, across all borders. And he made her disappear. Now I was seeing it firsthand.

“No,” Helen said. She took Maskwa’s hand away from her head. “You’re not taking me anywhere.”

“Helen, you have to-”

“No, Vinnie. I waited until Alex and Maskwa got here, so they could hear the whole story. Now it’s time for you and me to go to the police.”

“I don’t think you want to do that,” Vinnie said.

“I’m not going to run away,” she said. “I’m going to tell them everything that happened.” She hesitated. “Everything except Claude. There’s no reason to pull him into this. He died a hero. Let him stay a hero.”

“They’ll find out eventually.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” she said. “But I don’t have to tell them.”

“Helen..” Vinnie said. He tried to find some words but couldn’t.

“Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s go do this right now.”

They tried to talk her out of it, but it was obvious her mind was made up. A few minutes later, we were standing outside in the cold dead yard, watching Vinnie and Helen drive away. Helen looked at us through her window, then lifted her hand and put it flat against the glass.

I said my own goodbyes to Maskwa, this incredible man, and to Guy and his mother. I got in my truck and started down the road. There were snowflakes in the air. I drove down the empty highway, all the way to the station in Hearst, and parked next to Vinnie’s truck. I knew it would be a long wait, so I settled in and went to sleep.

A couple hours later, I picked my head up and saw Vinnie coming out of the station. He was alone, and he looked as tired and miserable as any man I had ever seen.

He gave me a nod and got in his truck, and then I followed him all the way home.