He sat on the kitchen stool at the counter beside the phone. I stood beside him. The dogs lay at our feet. I handed Tim a tissue for his tears. I listened to him explain the evening’s events. I squeezed his shoulder in comfort.
“I should phone Marnie too,” he said when he had finished the brief conversation. “She’s a friend of ours. She’s the one I left the message for asking about the retreat. She’ll be worried about why I been trying to get hold of her.”
He dialled a number and his first words were a surprise. Not the explanation I was expecting of why he was calling but, in a low voice, “We found the car.”
Then he was silent. Marnie seemed to be doing most of the talking.
Finally he asked, “Can I call you later if I need to talk to someone?”
I listened to him repeat the question three more times before he hung up.
“What about a missing person’s report?” I asked.
Tim reached into his pocket for the business card the Sûreté had given him and picked up the phone again.
“They said I have to do that in Ottawa,” he said when he hung up. “’Cuz that’s the last place she was seen. I’ll stop in at the police station on my way home.”
He began to cry again. “She had her lunch with her and everything. There was an apple, and some peanuts—some kind of nuts.”
I handed him another tissue.
“I’m going to have to pay the bills at the end of the month. I never had to do that before. I got no idea how to do that. God, I’m going to have to call my parole officer. That’s an ordeal I’m not looking forward to. I guess I better get going. But I have no idea where I am. How do I get back to the main highway?”
I handed him his jacket. “I’ll lead you back out in my car.”
Once more he broke down.
I was suddenly impatient with his tears. I wanted him to go. It took me aback, how strong the feeling was of wanting him out of my house. And how unkind that was to someone in his situation.
I let him follow me out to the main highway, and then turned the car for home. My brain was spinning as fast as my tires.
Mary Frances answered with a sleepy hello, but her voice became sharp and alert when she heard it was me. I never called after eleven. “Ellen, what is it? Are you alright?”
“Yes. No.”
“Hang on a minute, love. I’m going to go downstairs. Jack is snoring like a log. I can barely hear you.” Her words, spoken in her Yorkshire accent, were oddly comforting. She was my closest friend.
A moment later, her voice came on the line again. Sympathetic. “Is it Marc?”
I appreciated her concern. She had never approved of Marc—he was a “labourer”—but she’d tried to set aside her feelings to be supportive. And she only had herself to blame for our meeting: she had hired him to renovate her Chelsea farmhouse.
“No, it’s not about Marc. I haven’t heard from him.” I took a deep breath and plunged into my story.
There was a silence when I was done. Then the unmistakable sound of inhaling. I imagined her high cheek bones becoming even more prominent as she dragged on her cigarette.
“Do you think he did it?” Her voice was tight from holding the smoke in her lungs.
“I don’t know. I didn’t even remember his past until I was on my way home. And Marc away, oh, you know. I was so stupid, Mary Frances, inviting him here.”
I heard her exhale. “You mean because now he knows where you live?”
“Oh, God. I was thinking about my safety tonight. Anyway, he didn’t seem to know where he was. I don’t think he could find his way back. God. I don’t know what to think. I just walked down the railway tracks with a man who has served time for killing someone. He might have killed again. But he didn’t behave like a murderer.” I laughed a shaky laugh. “What do I know about what a murderer behaves like? But nothing about his behaviour seemed suspicious or guilty. His whole demeanour was of someone shocked and upset. Like me. Oh God, Mary Frances, either he’s innocent or my world has just turned upside down and I can’t trust my judgement anymore.”
“Ellen, come and sleep here.”
I took a deep breath. “No. Thanks. I’ll be okay. I think I just needed to talk to someone.”
“I should think so. Are you sure? Well, if you change your mind in the middle of the night, motor over and hammer on the door.”
“Or maybe you could send Jack over with a baseball bat.”
“He’s a proper scary sight in those striped pyjamas.”
The image of Mary Frances’s portly husband being shaken out of his snoring slumbers to be my bat-wielding knight in striped pyjamas made us both laugh. Which helped. A little.
I broke the rules with Beau and Belle. It wasn’t easy to get them up onto the bed. Marc and I had trained them well. In the end, I physically heaved them onto it, one at a time. And lay between them, shivering in their warmth. Wishing the warmth were Marc’s. Wishing for the home of his arms. Wishing for him to yell at me for having Tim over.
In the dark, the evening replayed itself like a video in my head. On second viewing, each odd thing Tim had said and done was suddenly illuminated. He wasn’t supposed to go by street signs. It was an odd quirk to begin with, but then he’d pronounced King Edward like it was a foreign word. If you weren’t sure about a street name, you didn’t say it like that. It sounded like he’d been trying too hard to pretend he wasn’t familiar with it. And he’d known all the street signs, except, apparently, the one where I’d given him a landmark. Had that just been to make it look like he needed to check for directions?
He’d rhymed off Lucy’s shoes. He’d deduced the shoes she’d had on her feet by a process of elimination. Why hadn’t he just seen what was on her feet? The police officer had said her slippers were on the passenger side floor. Lucy was extremely fastidious. She would never have tossed her slippers in the car without putting them in a bag. Of that, I was almost certain.
And then there was his saying maybe you had to have the key in the ignition to turn on an interior light. If they dusted for fingerprints on the steering wheel, they would find Tim’s. Had he been accounting for why they would show up? Had he been the one to drive the car?
He’d lifted up her bag too. Was that also to account for his fingerprints? Maybe he’d carried it to the car because Lucy hadn’t planned on going anywhere. Maybe he’d been able to rhyme off what was in her bag because he had packed it.
And the lunch. We hadn’t looked in the white plastic bag. It sounded like he had remembered too late he wasn’t supposed to know what kind of nuts were in it when he’d corrected himself from the specific to the general. Had he packed the lunch too?
And then there was my wanting him out of my house. My impatience with his tears. That was the oddest thing of all. It wasn’t like me to be impatient with someone who was so upset. Maybe he hadn’t been upset. Maybe they had been crocodile tears.
Who was this man Lucy had let into her life? The man I had met tonight had not been the confident, smiling man in the photo or the man with a first-year university education who had apparently expressed himself well in court. He had not been the capable man who knew how to live off the land and who shared the details of his life in articulate, if badly spelt, letters. The man I had met tonight had been a lost little boy. The little boy from the Brudenell backwoods. What had happened to the Tim Lucy had met and fallen in love with in prison?
I shut off these thoughts. A loved one going missing would be enough to rattle anyone out of their composure. But I could not shut off the video of the evening. It kept replaying in my head. Each time, Tim appeared to be acting. Overacting. Badly acting. Getting a reaction wrong. Getting a line wrong. Correcting himself mid-sentence.
Each little thing on its own didn’t amount to much. Each thing on its own was like a distant pop
of a firecracker in my brain—a tiny jolt of something not quite right.
Together, they lit up the sky.
In the dark I tossed and turned. Beau and Belle shifted and moaned with me.
No. I was the one overreacting. He was a man distraught that his girlfriend was missing. That would make you say and do bizarre things.
It seemed obvious what had happened. Lucy had driven up to the Gatineaus. She had parked her car close to the railway tracks to go for a walk. Something bad had happened on that walk. The police would find her in the morning. They would probably find her in the river—not alive. It was shocking and horrifying. But it was the only logical conclusion. There was nothing more I could do. I had played my part. I had found the car. I had called the police.
I drifted, finally, off to sleep.
Lucy is sitting on my bed. She is having trouble speaking. As if she is not quite awake, or has been drugged. Her mouth is working, as if she’s having a hard time formulating words. But anxious to get them out. I don’t want to hear what’s going to come. I want to tell her not to speak. But I can’t open my mouth. I can’t get out of bed. I can’t even put my hands over my ears; they are weighed down by bedcovers of lead.
I try not to listen, but her words brand themselves onto my brain.
I opened my eyes. My heart was pounding. I expected to see Lucy still sitting on the side of the bed. I could still hear her voice. It took a minute to realize it had been a dream. I sat up and reached for the light. Slowed my breathing and my heart.
At some point in the past few hours, the dogs had jumped back down to the floor. They were stretched out in their usual places on either side of the bed. Beau raised his head when the light came on.
In the bathroom I splashed cold water on my face. Dreams are just the garbage dump of the mind, I told my mirror image. I was upset because she’d gone missing. My mind was playing tricks on me. But Lucy’s voice was there in my head—her real voice, from last summer, regaling me with stories of people who received messages from the other side, who had psychic visions. No. I spoke the word out loud to the mirror. I was not one of those people.
I flicked the bathroom light off and limped back to bed. Shut my eyes. Tried to keep the dream at bay. But her words would not go away. Three sentences that made only half sense. They repeated themselves in my head, in Lucy’s voice, until I was forced to get up again and go across the hall to my office for a pen and paper. Beau followed me. To the office and then back to my bedroom. From the floor, he watched me writing. Then he lowered his head back to his paws and shut his eyes with a heavy sigh.
I looked at the three sentences I had written on the page.
Look in the poplar grove.
Write it in a book.
Tell Anna I’m safe.
Who was Anna? What poplar grove? Why was I writing this down? I was not going to start searching for Lucy. I certainly wasn’t going to let a dream image of Lucy tell me where to search. I wasn’t going to be involved in this in any way.
Something told me it would be far too dangerous.
4.
IT WAS AN ORDINARY DAY on the River Road construction site. The sun was shining. The river was sparkling in a crisp, light breeze. The workers were on a coffee break in their truck cabs. There was no abandoned Suzuki. There were no boats. No dogs. No helicopters. No police. No one was searching. No one, apparently, was missing.
The construction workers shook their heads when I asked about the police in my poor French. They had been there since seven. They had seen no one.
I hit the bridge over to the Ontario side at eight-thirty with every other commuter from Chelsea. The traffic annoyed me. I usually waited until after rush hour to go in to work. I was here because I’d woken up too early and been compelled to go for a drive.
It wasn’t my business. The police knew what they were doing. Or not doing. They had to make sure it was legitimate. Maybe Lucy had left on her own. Maybe she didn’t want to be found. I was supposed to tell someone named Anna—if she even existed—that Lucy was safe. Maybe she was safe because she’d taken off. Maybe she was safe because she was dead. No. I didn’t believe that. I couldn’t believe that.
Then why was I supposed to look in a poplar grove?
God, a psychologist would have a field day with a missing person showing up in my dreams, urging me to search for her.
I inched my brain back to reason as the traffic inched over the bridge. I was going to go to work and leave the searching to the police.
Roots Research was located in an aging red-brick building above a second-hand bookstore in Ottawa’s Byward Market. Angel, the company founder, joked that the bookstore was the company library. It did have its uses. In fact, there were quite a few “company libraries” along this stretch of Dalhousie. A few streets over, the market proper offered up fresh fruits and vegetables from local vendors during the growing season and, all year, excellent cheese, meat, fruit, and fish. There were good restaurants and bars, and live music that Marc sometimes came down to hear with me. The best part was that it was close to the interprovincial bridge. If I had to work in the city, there was no better place.
There were three of us working for Angel. He was a remnant from the hippie era, with a balding head he now shaved every day and a love of all things rock ’n’ roll. I’d been with him for five years, since he’d rescued me from a government job. My ideal was to be working for myself, like Lucy. But this was the next best thing. Angel was an easy boss. The hours were flexible, the atmosphere relaxed, and I could do things like Internet searches and report write-ups from home.
“Good God, Ellen,” was Angel’s startled greeting.
I gave him a warning look. “I’m researching the effects of traffic jams on the moods of Ottawa commuters. I wouldn’t advise talking to me yet.”
My computer wouldn’t boot.
“Your computer isn’t used to working this early either,” said Angel. “Go get a coffee or something. Don’t come back for awhile.” He waved me away and sat down at my desk.
I took myself across the street to Mellos. Coffee was the last thing I needed. Look how it wired Lucy. Where was she? Why weren’t the police searching? I downed a coffee I didn’t want and dodged traffic on Dalhousie, feeling a twinge down my leg as I did.
My home page was staring at me benignly when I returned to my desk.I picked up the phone. Put it down. Picked it up. Dialled. Put it down. Repeated this process until I finally got to the ringing stage.
Tim picked up on the second ring. His frustration matched mine. They’d sent only one cop up, he said. He’d filed a missing person’s report in Ottawa on his way home from my house. He’d told them about his record, he said. They’d asked him to come back this morning. He’d been grilled, he said. Now they wanted to talk to me.
He gave me the number for Detective Sergeant Howard Roach of the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Police.
“Our hands are tied,” said Sergeant Roach when I was put through. His voice was gruff and pleasant and cynical.
There was a click on the line. “My partner is going to listen in.”
I told my story to the sergeant and his anonymous partner. My co-workers looked up from their desks and I let them listen too.
“We don’t have any official capacity once we cross the border into Quebec,” explained Sergeant Roach in my ear. “We’ve offered our ’copters and dogs, but they refused our help. We’re going up to the site this afternoon. We’re treating it as suspicious. Where do you work? We’ll come and take your statement on our way back.”
“Do you have any idea what time it will be?”
“Later this afternoon is the best I can do.”
“I’m not sure if I’ll be here or at home.”
“Give me all your coordinates—we’ll find you.”
“I’d rather you found Lucy.
” My tone was dry.
“We’re working on it, Ms. McGinn.” He sounded cheerful.
I gave him directions to the office and my house.
I was too restless to work. I put my coat on to leave. I assured a now much more concerned Angel that I was fine.
I drove back to the site. I was hoping to see a full-scale search in progress. I was hoping to meet a couple of Ottawa cops.
I found a couple of Quebec cops instead, and Tim with a woman I’d never seen before. The Sûreté officers were just getting into cars. One of them gave me his card: Luc Godbout, Agent.
“Has anyone taken your statement?” asked Agent Godbout. “Non? I will return in half an hour. Can you attend?”
I could attend.
Tim was visibly shaking. “I didn’t sleep all night,” he said. “This is Marnie Baxter. She’s a good friend of Lucy and me.”
Marnie was a strong-looking stocky woman. Maybe the same age as Lucy. Her hair was a deep auburn with grey streaks in it. Her face was so freckled it looked permanently tanned.
This was the woman Tim had called from my house. I had never heard Lucy mention her. But that didn’t mean anything. Lucy and I had never talked about her other friends.
Marnie didn’t smile. There was no expression that I could read in her pale blue eyes. Possibly there was no expression in mine either. We were, after all, in shock. All of us.
“You live on Cameron,” she said. Her voice was raspy, a smoker’s voice. “I know the area. I have friends on McDonald. Where are you on Cameron?”
I tried to be vague. I didn’t like her knowing the name of my road. If she knew the name of my road that meant Tim had told her. But I had never mentioned the name. Which meant Tim had read the sign at the top of the road. There was no reason he couldn’t have; it wasn’t as if he couldn’t read. Except that odd comment of Lucy’s stuck in my head—that he found his way around by landmarks.
Tell Anna She's Safe Page 5
