Blue Star

by Valerie Van Clieaf

  When interviewed, O’Meara and Arenas admitted breaking into the boatyard and taking pictures of what they’d found there. They didn’t mention hiring Miles Farthing to hack the Clarendon’s server. Bolton told the police that he paid a staff person for membership and other lists the civilians had shared with the sergeants. The police secured official copies when they presented the club manager with a warrant.

  Everyone arrested at Batlan’s that night had been questioned. Everyone else at the dinner, including the bartender, Marvin Roche, was being pulled in for questioning. Jeri had arranged arrest warrants for the lot, including Paul Revier. They assumed he’d be at the club, but when VPD got there, he was gone. He’d slipped out of Vancouver on an early morning Central Mountain Air flight to Prince Rupert. He was to be flown back down to Vancouver later today, accompanied by a uniform from the Terrace detachment.

  When interviewed, Bolton gave police the camera he used to take pictures of the men present at Batlan’s party the night before. They had the guest list. The names had sent a shock wave right up the line—RCMP, VPD, a few heavy hitters in the business world and one man, deReesen, a sitting judge up in Prince George. The big guy he’d found on the back stairs was Theo Penderman. He was at the Vancouver General. Diagnoses: stroke.

  There were officers on the trail of the guy who got away. Initially, the initials GGC was all they had from the briefcase the perp had left behind at Batlan’s Place. Then the VPD found Greg Crothers overnight case in Batlan’s suite and his passport.

  Police also had the picture that Michael Bolton had taken at Batlan’s dinner party. Once they had a good shot of the guy, it went out across Canada and the US. Crothers didn’t show up on any database, anywhere. Then they caught what they hoped was a break.

  Crothers had called a taxi about a kilometre down the road from Batlan’s place. 5-0 Taxi dispatch said he was dropped at a 24-hour Tim Horton’s in Abbotsford. He’d had almost three hours lead time. They figured he’d managed to get across the border on foot. Or he might still be in Canada.

  Everyone was furious Crothers had given them the slip, but they had another lead—a dry cleaning receipt from South Village Dry Cleaning, still attached to a blue, merino wool sweater in the suitcase he left in the suite at the club. The business was in Bethesda, Maryland. It was Sunday and it took a while to locate the owner. Gregory Crothers was Gregori Kirigin. He’d given the cleaners a cell number. More important, the cleaner offered a delivery service and they had an address. Bethesda was following up.

  Last update from the hospital indicated all the children were awake, except a boy named Christopher. He’d undergone surgery this morning and was still sleeping. Hospital staff were feeding the children and Social Services staff were on-site, but everyone was taking it slow. The child they rescued from the club was to be transferred to Lions Gate Hospital. Carey Bolton told staff her name was Marie.

  They knew about Georgina, the young girl who was hurt attempting to escape but had no idea where she was. Carey had talked about a doctor, but he hadn’t yet been identified. Techs were examining computers from all residences. They should have some answers soon.

  “Do you think the kids are going to be okay?” Whitaker had asked him. Like all of them, he was pretty shaken by the horrific implications of what they’d uncovered.

  “I hope so,” said Alex. The image of MacLeish raping the small boy leapt immediately to mind. He promised himself that he would talk with somebody about the video, sooner than later. It wasn’t something he would share with Gwen. He couldn’t bear to burden her.

  The media were in a frenzy and police media spokespersons had their hands full. The TV news at noon had featured reporters at the front entrance of the Clarendon, more out front of 14th Street RCMP Headquarters in North Van and someone covering the main branch of the VPD on Canada Way. There was a media van outside of E Division headquarters in Surrey when Alex arrived.

  CHAPTER 46

  Lucas was falling asleep over the late lunch I made for us, so I insisted he go back to bed. He was asleep almost immediately.

  I peeked out the front window. We’d had strange cars parked outside the last few hours. I figured they were journalists, but I needed to get out of the cottage and decided to make a run for it. I slipped out the front door, car key ready, and sprinted for the Toyota. A woman a couple of doors down was out of her car and after me. I jumped in the Toyota and took off, losing her in the mid-afternoon traffic on Wall Street.

  Half an hour later, I found myself parked at the turnoff to the trail, just up the road from the scene of last night’s face off. What if I’d been alone, and I was the one with that rock, and the bastard was on the ground? I wanted to grab that rock from Lucas, and I wanted to cave his head in and when I looked at Lucas, I saw my anger and fury reflected there. What stopped us? What does it take to cross the line and kill another human being?

  Lucas was devastated by what we’d been through, separately, and together these past few weeks. Right now, I wasn’t okay, but I knew that somehow, eventually, I would be. I wasn’t so sure about Lucas.

  He’ll talk about things when he’s ready. That was Bart’s advice. Good advice, but it didn’t seem like it was enough. I wanted to do more but didn’t know what more was. And I had a suspicion that there was nothing I could do, just as there was nothing he could do to help me. It was up to Lucas now and it was up to me.

  The trail looks so different in the light of day. It’s thickly wooded on either side and the North Shore Mountains make a beautiful, backdrop. A memory surfaces. I’m a child, squatting on the shore of Lake Superior, water lapping at the toes of my runners. The sun, a bright red ball hovered just above the water line, right in my line of sight so I had to squint. Infinite water stretched out before me, not like glass because Superior was never like glass; too big to be home to only one spirit.

  I was wearing one of dad’s jackets, more like a blanket really, the cuffs rolled up, the back so long it pooled on the sand behind me. I’d probably refused to wear my own jacket, always running, always too warm, too constrained, even then. I stretched out my arms and slowly, carefully, placed my palms on the water’s surface—a child’s wonder at the grandeur of this water universe; a toddler, trying to understand the mighty spirits of Lake Superior.

  But my memory of crouching on the shore is a memory of a home movie dad took, because he had brought his Super8 along as he so often did and captured my awe and wonder. I watched that movie with him again, only a few years before he died. It was a very real memory for him, and he sure loved that clip, but does it count as a real memory for me? I think so, because they say we remember every single thing we lay our eyes on and store that remembrance somewhere. I like to think that dad’s clip helped tease out the memory for me.

  The photographer’s lens is the eye of my time and my parents’ too. It’s the tool I chose a long time ago to tell my stories. In a way, we allow it to stand in for memory; we don’t even question that it does. The camera lens becomes our eyes. It sees so much better than we do. We record what it sees. But if we want to, we can choose one angle over another or a long shot over a close one. We can change, transmute, enhance, even disfigure our photo memories and where is reality in all that? I didn’t have an answer for that question. If I was to be honest with myself, I don’t really like asking it.

  Since that first time that I had crouched on the shore of that incredible lake, swam in it, floated on it, and yearned to understand its majesty, its mystery—did I get any closer to it than the two-year-old child in Dad’s home movie? Maybe not. All my life, I’ve been entranced by the stark power of the photographic image, it’s near perfection, the beauty in those perfectly caught moments. But so much about the intrinsic truth of things does not lie still in your hand and let you peer at it. Maybe understanding and knowledge emerge from a place that we can never see, or name.

  I left my camera in the car and started down the hill. I rounded a bend in the road and
further down I could see yellow crime scene tape fluttering in the breeze. Even from here, I could hear a dog barking and thought maybe some hikers had brought their dog along with them. Two cruisers and a van with the RCMP logo were parked on either side of the track. As I approached the vehicles, three men emerged from the woods.

  “Please ma’am. Come no further! This is a crime scene,” said a uniformed officer tersely.

  “Yes, I know that.” I could hear the edge in my voice.

  “Sorry Ms. O’Meara, I didn’t recognize you at first. It was Lassiter. He was here last night. The team had arrived at the van, carrying a small black bag. Lassiter opened the back door of the van and the three of them placed the bag carefully inside. Lassiter turned to me.

  “Why did you come?”

  “I don’t really know,” I told him truthfully. “I guess I just want to better understand what happened.”

  “Of course, ma’am,” he said, nodding sympathetically.

  “Is that what I think it is?” I asked McAllister.

  “Yes ma’am. It’s a body bag.”

  “It’s very small.”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “It’s a child, isn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t say.”

  CHAPTER 47

  Sunday, October 19th

  I watched the men carry dad’s body and lay it beside the others, beside the pit they’d dug at the bottom of the communal garden. Mom couldn’t stop crying. Afraid she would give them away; someone had to cover her mouth and force her to silence. They had to pull her off him so they could bury him.

  I couldn’t bear to look at him on the ground beside the others, his sightless eyes fixed on nothing. His gaping chest wound now a deep black. I didn’t watch as they put him in the grave. Didn’t watch as they covered the bodies with dirt. My fear shames me, even now.

  We took what we could carry; escaped to the jungle. Some elected to try their luck over the border in Mexico, but the army sometimes followed. For months, we hid from the army, always on the run. There was never enough to eat.

  Mom decided to return to La Perla. We were exhausted and there was nowhere else for us to go. She knew the guerillas had murdered my great-grandfather, but she didn’t know, until we arrived there, that my father’s family asked the Guatemalan army to install a Garrison on La Perla land. She must have been terrified to find the army there.

  About 5,000 Maya and a few Mestizos were living in two villages on La Perla. One village supported the Arenas family and the army, while the other supported the guerillas. We stayed with a family that was pro-Arenas family and pro-army. That must have been hard for her too. It wasn’t for me. I was afraid of the guerillas. One of them killed my father. I can remember the look on the boy’s face when he realized what he’d done. An accident. They were there to ambush the army, not kill the campesinos.

  The civil war was still raging, and the guerillas made constant forays onto La Perla land: against the army garrison, against the infrastructure of La Perla and against villagers known to oppose them.

  The army had a special tactic they employed against the guerillas: The civil patrols. Every Maya and Ladino male living on La Perla who was twelve years and older was forced to do civil patrol duty: looking for guerillas and guerilla sympathizers. To refuse to participate was a death sentence. I remember the young boys, not much older than me and their civil patrol hats and their guns. It was years later that I found out that the La Perla civil patrol was the largest in the highlands. Some said they could be as brutal as the soldiers.

  We had been at La Perla a few weeks when mom heard that one of my father’s uncles, Enrique Arenas, had come to La Perla to oversee the coffee harvest. After Ignacio Arenas was murdered, the Arenas family lived in Guatemala City year-round. If Enrique was there, then an uncle of mom’s, Te’k Si’m, who always worked closely with the owners during harvest would be on site, in the workers’ lodgings near the mansion. Late one afternoon, close to sundown, we went looking for him to ask for his help. He was happy to see us. So many of mom’s family had been killed in the civil war and she was his niece, and very dear to him. She told Te’k Si’m she wanted to get out of the highlands and go to Guatemala City, where she felt the two of us would be safer. He agreed that was a good plan but knew we couldn’t walk there. It wasn’t safe for her to be on the road, alone, with me. It wasn’t safe for any woman now. Rape by the soldiers was common, as was the abduction and trafficking of children.

  Uncle worked for the Arenas family as a handyman a good part of the year and earned a little more than most of the Maya who worked at the plantation. A few evenings later, he visited, bringing the money we needed to travel. Somehow, he’d also managed to get identification papers for us.

  We left La Perla early one morning a few days later, crowded onto the flatbed of a supply truck with many others. The truck took us to the nearby town of Nebaj, the scene that day of a big civil patrol rally. We watched from the highest steps of the Catholic Church in the city center as hundreds and hundreds of men and boys marched in front of us, wearing matching civil patrol hats and carrying guns.

  One man stood close to us on the steps. He was tall and pale skinned and very imposing in mirror sunglasses and a different kind of army hat than the Guatemalan soldiers wore. I’d never seen an American before and asked mom who he was. She told me he was a soldier in the United States Army and that his country supported the Guatemalan army. He’ had come to witness the great success of their campaign.

  It was late afternoon before we left Nebaj and the highlands. I remember how excited I was when our camioneta, a brightly coloured and ancient school bus imported from the US, rumbled to life and took off at high speed down the road, a trail of smoke and evil smelling fumes billowing out behind it.

  Our journey from La Perla to Guatemala City took four days. Each camioneta we boarded took us closer and closer to the capital. Sometimes we got seats, sometimes we stood. Always we were packed in tight. Each time we passed through an army checkpoint, everyone had to get off the bus, show their papers and answer questions. Dad had taught both of us to speak, read and write Spanish and mom conversed easily with the guards.

  Her story was always the same: We were going to live with her sister in Guatemala City. She’d been promised a job in a small hotel there. Maybe that’s why we were always allowed to get back on the bus. Some weren’t.

  We reached Antigua the morning of the third day. Te’k Si’m told mom to go from there to San Juan del Obispo, a small Maya town nearby. He had a cousin there, a jeweler who worked in jade and went to market in Guatemala City once a week to sell. We walked from Antigua to San Juan in a few hours and found uncle’s cousin easily. He was going to Guatemala City the next morning and he took us with him.

  Morgan was back. Lucas listened to her drop the car keys on a small side table near the front door, then take off her boots. She came into the kitchen and put on the kettle before sitting down beside him.

  “Sweetheart, did you get some sleep?”

  “I got a little. I’ve been writing about my family. Our time in Guatemala.”

  “I’m here, if you want to talk.”

  “I know. I was just going to write about how mom and I escaped from Guatemala. Did I ever tell you about the day we came to Canada?”

  “No.”

  “Remember when we visited Guatemala City and we stayed in that small hotel in Zone 10.”

  “I’ll never forget that—gated houses in a gated zone.”

  “The Canadian Embassy used to be in Zone 9, right next door.”

  “Zone 9 is very modern.”

  “With the help of an uncle of mom’s, we made it to San Juan del Obispo, a Maya town just outside of Antigua. The next day, a jeweler that uncle had put us in touch with, drove us from there to Guatemala City. Our destination was an area of poor barrios in the north of the city, Zone 1, the old city. Mom had heard that thousands of homeless were living there
and she thought we could hide there and be safe, at least until the civil war was over.”

  “There’d been a major earthquake in Guatemala City seven years before. The government didn’t have the capacity to deal with a catastrophe of that magnitude. Thousands died in the quake and it left over a million homeless. People were still living amongst the rubble. Add to that the thousands more, like mom and I, who had come from the highlands to escape the bloodshed. Flimsy huts covered every habitable square inch, made from everything imaginable.”

  “Had your mom ever been to Guatemala City?”

  “No.”

  “It must have been overwhelming for her.”

  “I think so. So many people, the desperation of the whole scene and ours as well. We walked around and around for hours, looking for help, or someone who could give us some direction. There were people trying to organize the homeless. Mom found one couple and talked with them for a long time.

  That first night, we slept with strangers, all of us huddled together in an alley against a wall. The next morning, with the last of the money she had, mom bought us tortillas. Then she told me we were going to go to the Canadian Embassy and ask to be admitted to Canada as refugees. She’d asked the jeweler to show her where the Embassy was, just in case.

  “But why did she choose Canada?”

  “Many went to Mexico and many went to the US. Both were close. But mom reasoned that since Father Gurriarán had studied the cooperative movement at a Canadian University, Canada would be a safe place to go.”

  “So, your mom told you that you were leaving Guatemala.”

  “Yes. That day.”

  “Your mom was a courageous woman, sweetheart.”