Mission

by Paul Forrester-O'Neill

  On that early March morning she stepped into the taped-off area as though it were a site of religious significance; on tip-toes, thin-legged, like a heron, her head extended forward slightly, the long-fingered hands plucking and picking at the equipment as she set it down, gently. She put on a hard yellow hat and a calico mask fastened at the back, changed her footwear to sturdier boots and stretched her hands and fingers into latex gloves. She took a small camera out of its case and wrapped it around her wrist, peeled the cellophane back off the new journal she bought for every investigation, wrote her name in the front and printed the word MISSION beneath it.

  She was there almost five hours, this lone shape amongst the ruins, half-bird, half-scientist, and for most of that time, she stooped and pincered. She crouched and scratched among the detritus, moving larger stones with her feet, gathering up scraps with fine and broad sweeps and putting them in sealable sachets she’d later label in terms of date and time and location. She took over three hundred photographs, made two dozen pages of notes.

  It was work for Frances. It was what she did and how she did it. And, in the same way that for some people a golf course was only so many acres of grass and sand but to others it was a place of aesthetic bliss so, for Frances, those areas of debris and ruin choked in dusty air were her milieu. They were her Augusta nationals.

  Mid-afternoon she stilled herself, ruffled her arms and legs. The head tilted to one side, the eyes went north to listen and find light and, with the same reverence she arrived with, she made her way back to where she’d set her things down. The camera and journal were put away, the boots swapped for lighter shoes. The gloves were peeled off, turned inside out, rolled into one and dropped into a larger sachet along with the mask. And, lastly, the hat. She blinked hard, mussed her hair and stretched her arms fully upwards. Then she picked everything up she’d carried, attached them all to shoulders and arms and hands and walked, not the way she came, not under the tape like a flyweight, not across the bridge that led into the town where a small gauntlet of onlookers waited, but around the perimeter fence and out along the unmade track at the back of the mill, past where the obvious log pile was with its tarpaulin and rope, and into the woods beyond.

  Over at the Land Management Agency Ted Mallender slumped his forehead onto the desk. “I don’t know what to do,” he said, “you call me up, you ask to come in and talk, and look at me, it’s embarrassing.”

  Vincent stood in the doorway, motionless. The opened letter, one of three, mildly scented and handwritten in round, cursive script lay slack between Ted’s fingers.

  “It’s understandable,” Vincent said, “you’re in a quandary.”

  Ted raised his head.

  “But I’m not a quandary man,” he said, and picked up the framed photograph of Lily in Oklahoma.

  “We’re all quandary men, Ted. We all have our uncertainties. Yours is whether you can trust her again, whether you can look her in the face and not feel the same hurt you felt before. Yours is whether to forgive her, to welcome her back into your life and your home and the town where you were born and raised. Those are your quandaries,” Vincent said, stepping forward, “those are your uncertainties, your things to go and figure.” He sighed, leant his hands on the table. “Mine is what to do with the land.”

  Ted let the letter fall from his grip.

  “My people are pushing me, Ted. They’re saying the plans we have are already there, ready to go. But without the land, there’s a quandary.”

  Vincent sat down. The tips of his fingers touched the opened letter.

  “You see, we need to buy the timber mill land cheaply. That’s the whole point. That’s the only way we can offer more for the third section.”

  “There’s a third section?” Ted said, and placed an antacid between the roof of his mouth and his tongue.

  “Yes, there is, Ted. The most important section. The section we want more than anything. The Cassidy land. Where the homestead is.”

  Ted sizzled, his mouth open, a pinkish spume at his lips.

  “You’re going to buy the Cassidy land?” he frothed.

  “We’re going to try. And then the plans can start.”

  Ted pointed vaguely east. “The Cassidy land?”

  “I can’t talk about the plans, yet. My people won’t let me. But, let me tell you this, they depend one hundred per cent on the buying of the land. And you need these plans, Ted,” he said, leaning forward again, his fingers tapping this time on the letter. “The town needs these plans. Without the mill, the town has nothing, no lifeblood, no heart, and no soul. Without something, it’ll fall to its knees. Look at it, already. People are wearing juju chains, Ted. They’re looking at cattle. They think stones are creating their own formations. They need something. And that’s just what the plans are. Salvation. You imagine that? You imagine rescuing the town, riding in on a white charger like a knight? You think Lily would like that? You think Lily would like to walk out with the man who dragged the town up from its knees?”

  Ted picked up the photograph, looked again at the pleats and grooves of the organza dress.

  “But I have another quandary, Ted. You know what that is? You know who that is?”

  Ted shook his head.

  “It’s Jake Massey. You know why? Because Jake Massey is insinuating he burned the mill down.”

  “He’s a bullshitter.”

  “Whether he’s a bullshitter or he isn’t is not the point here, Ted. The point is if the loss adjuster hears this, if she figures it’s Jake burned the mill down then the company gets the compensation. If the company gets the compensation, they have no reason to sell the land cheaply. If they don’t sell the land, there’s no plan. If there’s no plan, there’s no salvation. You see? Or, on the other hand, if she doesn’t figure it’s Jake, if Jake’s not around, if you show her all the evidence of the lack of investment, the accident reports over the years, the company gets blamed for neglect. If the company gets blamed, the company loses out. If the company loses out, they sell the land cheaply. If they sell the land cheaply, the plan kicks in. If the plan kicks in, the town is salvaged from its juju chains and you come riding in on your white charger. Do you follow me, Ted?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Be good to Frances Harte. Show her the evidence.”

  “There isn’t any.”

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I need Jake out of the way, Ted. At least until she’s gone. Maybe he could go and look for Lily. Would you like that?”

  Ted looked down at the letter again, put it to his nose and sniffed it.

  “Lester can go with him. Lester likes a drive out, don’t you, Lester?”

  Lester glanced over at Vincent and nodded. Already he got the long roads, the backroads and the tracks off. He got the woods of spruce and pine, the snap of the undergrowth, louder the further they went. He got the covering of leaves and the darkening places where only scraps of light appeared, like tickertape, where the trees were muffle and cloak and Jake was begging for mercy.

  “Can you do that?” Ted said.

  “Lester can do anything, Ted. He’s one of my men.”

  “And the Cassidy land? You think you can get it?”

  “What did he say? Treat failure as an impossibility.”

  The following morning Sylvie Buckle’s was awash and lathered even more than usual with rumours of all kinds. The main topic, the top of the list, was Jake Massey. And his beating outside Harry’s the night before.

  Apparently, so the stories went, after too many beers and whisky chasers, Jake finally snapped. Weeks, months, years even, of resentment and dislike, on both sides, popped like corks. The mill workers were cowards, he said. They were like mice, afraid of their own shadows with no balls big enough to stand up to the company themselves. They were full of bullshit. Every last one of them. They knew nothing of the truth, nothing of what really happened to the mill. And, in turn, right back at him, blow after blo
w, Jake was a lazy, no-good waster with shit for brains and his father was exactly the same pickled fruit before him.

  It began, so they said, in the corner of the bar just before midnight, and ended outside just after with Jake unconscious on the riverbank where he was left. Rumour said he was so bloodied you couldn’t recognise him. Rumour said there was a stab wound somewhere, a dragged broken bottle across his back. And rumour said that by morning light he was gone. And no-one knew where. No-one could find him.

  Then, of course, there was Lily Mallender and her letters of scented repentance. You see, in Sylvie’s, Lily’s soap story of local girl makes good and divides opinion by flaunting it to local girl blows Venezuelan gardener and then asks for forgiveness was always a given. Most women understood Lily. Whether they were outraged by her actions or they weren’t, they still recognised her as the girl from farming stock, the prom queen in pigtails who married Ted, and the middle-aged woman who took out her frustrations on a hirsute tender of lawns. For Rita, there was little choice but to understand. Wasn’t she looking for the same way out? Wasn’t Dan Cruck just a poor man’s Ted, albeit younger, more sexually willing and less likely to visit the bathroom twice a night?

  In relation to Dan, rumours were that, given the non-appearance of the company men and the kick in the balls that came with Rita’s rejection, he was leaving town in the next couple of days and the big concern was that he might take out all his bitterness by denying every single one of his post-coital concerns to the loss adjuster, thereby leaving the fate of the town in the hands of the woman whose obvious lack of lipstick, eyeliner and anything that resembled even a half-decent hair product placed her in the camp of either spinster or lesbian. And that was without the hard hat, boots and latex gloves.

  There was mention, in passing, of the Li sisters who’d visited a ninety-per-cent gauzed and bandaged Lee Shaw who, in his state of wordless shock, remembered nothing of the fire or how it started. And, even though his mystique was no longer top of the list, no blow-dried rumour session would be the same without the scattered updates on the Cassidy man. First thing was, in spite of possessing radar on a military scale, no-one in Sylvie’s was any the wiser about him and Delilah. No-one knew why she was there, what she was doing, or what plans they had. Not even Rita. Next, he was a practising recluse, a hermit self-flagellating his way through winter and spring on a diet of tinned fruit. Or, he was a selective mute serving penance for past sins. And he was on medication of the tranquilising kind, collecting animal pelts in the woods.

  Lester stood in the middle of Jake’s apartment and called Vincent.

  “He’s not here,” he said, “and the bed’s not slept in.”

  He heard his master sigh. “He got beaten up last night. Some of the mill workers got to him.”

  “Did he squeal, about the mill?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows where he is.”

  “You want me to go and look for him?”

  “The most important thing now is that he doesn’t get to the loss adjuster. That’s it. Period. He gets to her or she gets to him, we’re potentially fucked. The rest we can deal with. So, just follow her, make sure they don’t meet. I’ll come over to the apartment building.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s with Ted at the LMA. I heard she’s leaving tonight. We’ve got so many hours, Lester, and that’s it. We just don’t know where Jake is.”

  There was a kitchen knife embedded in the sill, a strewn crepe bandage with pixels of old, dried blood. There was a photograph of Delilah and Rita taken on a stoop somewhere, and a magazine opened on Harley’s and Goldwing’s, one of them circled.

  “What’s there?” Vincent said.

  “He’s buying bulk, by the looks. Crates, multipacks.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Couple of cash-rolls, loose notes. New pair of Texan boots, a map of the mid-west. He’s a scrambled kid.”

  Lester walked over to the window, opened it. “And the place stinks.”

  He gulped at the air of the spring day, heard the wheeze of the southern train a mile down the tracks. The sink was an assortment of skewed dishes. There was a spread pack of cards on the table next to a half-finished bottle of beer. He was hungry, licked his lips again. He saw a stray dog slip its way down to the river’s edge, and felt, as he did so, the tiny shoot of a chest pain.

  Frances gathered the material. She folded her wings around what she’d collected. She nested, labelled her sachets and bags, dated them, took her German-made magnifier to the contents and measured them up against guidebooks and manuals she used: The journals of past cases, directories of timber and metal, lists of flammable reactions, her leather-bound bible of soil. She studied the photographs the same way, zooming in on the colours and textures of erosions and burns, looking for patterns and time-scales.

  She listened back to recordings she’d made, looked through the accompanying notes and annotations. She walked around the room as she did so, her head as if pecking, making suggestions to herself, a pause, a flick of the eyes, a leg that might bend and rise a moment off the ground. She listened to Ted again, to the history of the mill, to its purchase/rescue, to his part in its resurrection, and to his first-hand observation of the gradual dearth of investment. She’d seen the photographs of the mill, one in the mid-seventies and one four months ago, the deterioration, the damaged roof slates, the rotting frames. She’d looked at the minutes and agendas of the Mission Development Committee where the concerns around the mill were raised, seen the letters sent to the company and the replies, usually months later, offering little.

  She listened once more to the foreman Dan Cruck, who, with swollen corporate loyalty and no fiancée to sweeten him, suggested the investment was proportionate to the size of the mill and the company’s other concerns, that any company would review its options on a regular basis and that, as far as he was concerned, it was the workforce and not the company who were slacking. It was, so he said, a case of arson, a deliberate act against the mill and the company. And he gave her a short list of ex-employees, with poor attendance records and warnings against them, who had enough of a grievance to do it. Top of the list, and underlined, was Jake Massey.

  She’d seen the mill workers themselves, who’d fantailed around her in Harry’s bar and, in short, barked sentences, spat out their gripes: Lack of investment, outdated machinery, poor working conditions, no consultation, the token lackeys, the days lost through injuries and illness, the missing digits, the lung issues. She’d listened with her file of notes in front of her, her head often to one side, her face giving nothing away. And she’d told them, just as she’d told Ted and Dan, that she would collate all the evidence and make her recommendations. She could offer nothing more.

  As an appendix to her meeting with the mill workers, there was the following note: Recent-bruised faces and knuckles, the odd blood stain, all upper body.

  It was late afternoon. She picked up the sachets and bags, started to put them away. She looked down at the half-packed suitcase and, on the table in front of her, at the last entry in her notes, towards the back of the journal:

  There is a likelihood, somewhere between moderate and considerable, that the fire was started deliberately, and that the perpetrator was local and made his way in and out of the site via the woods behind the mill. This remains a matter of speculation. There is one more avenue of investigation still to pursue in relation to who this perpetrator might be. There is a name and an address.

  Lester watched, mid-afternoon, as the door of the building she was in opened. He watched her pause in the doorway, check inside the folder she plucked from under her wing and draw a long, spindled finger down the page. He watched her take out a pen from her plumage and write something down, look skywards, and leave. He called Vincent.

  “Looks like she’s heading for the apartment,” he said.

  “Jake’s not here,” said Vincent, “there’s no sign. I’ll get rid of the evidence anyway.”

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nbsp; He watched her turn into the street towards the southern neighbourhoods, the head slightly angled. He watched her take the sidewalks, go past the dog-packs and clutter. He watched her slow the closer to the apartments she got, pause again, her head down to check on the folder, look up, shake herself, and go inside. He lit the cigar, moved into the shade of the doorway, and waited. There was an ache to his bulk by then, a heat and soreness to his feet. A flat cake of sweat bristled on his chest and a beaded curve arced beneath his eyes. He blinked, hard and quick, felt the dampness on his lashes.

  Two minutes later, she came out again. She’d knocked and waited, then hearing not a sneakered peep, she left Jake a note and a card she’d slipped under the door of his apartment, both of which Vincent had removed by the time she walked out of the block and into the soft, spring sunlight suffused with cigar smoke.

  At just before nine the light in the rented room went out, and a minute later she was in the doorway with a suitcase she could wheel and a valise attached to her by a king-sized strap around her frail shoulders. The suitcase was lighter, holding a limited range of practical clothing. The valise, though, contained all the evidence she hadn’t already sent to the laboratory, plus the camera, the rock-hammer, the magnifier, work boots, hard hat and all of the folders she kept, as well as the case journal, sectioned and colour-coded, that included the underlined name of Jake Massey, against which she’d written: Possible suspect. No tangible evidence. Hearsay only.