Tell Anna She's Safe

by Brenda Missen

  “Is that when it happens for you? The fourth?” There was amusement in his voice. “I’ll remember that. That and the romantic paraphernalia. Candles and wine. Anything you want.”

  Romantic paraphernalia. Lucy had smuggled romantic paraphernalia into prison. Kevin’s description was suddenly in my head. Of course she would have been smuggling it into their PFVs. It was beginning to make more sense.

  “There aren’t any rules,” I said to Quinn.

  “Clearly not.” He laughed. I made myself laugh with him. But I was back to my edgy state. In the car, Steve Quinn had gone back to being Sergeant Quinn. I wanted to be home. I also wished Steve Quinn would stay with me.

  In my mind, he did.

  *

  SHE WAS STANDING IN THE line-up for her third PFV. She felt weighed down today. She was weighted down. Literally. With “romantic paraphernalia,” all stashed in the deep pockets in her baggy pants. Everyone did it. She’d discovered that last time, chatting in the parking lot with the wife of another inmate. They couldn’t body search you unless they had “reasonable cause,” which usually meant someone had tipped them off that you were trying to bring in drugs.

  She was shaking in her boots but she was going to walk by this guard anyway. And she was going to get away with it. Big deal. Where was it getting her? Into a depressing sham of a house surrounded by a high chain-link fence, which was surrounded by an even higher chain-link fence, and barbed wire and surveillance cameras and security guards. There was always—still, ever—something standing between her and what she wanted. The barriers, in fact, were getting more literal and solid. Maybe that was progress—that they had arrived in the material world. Maybe getting through concrete barriers was the final test.

  She was intent on analyzing this new idea and didn’t notice how close she was getting to the front of the line. Before she had time to think about it, she was walking undetected through the metal detector and following the guard to the personal search room.

  And it was something after all. A small step toward her future. Which in this one minor instance meant a romantic weekend with Tim. Baby steps, she told herself, watching her belongings being transferred into the vile institutional suitcase. Baby steps so you don’t spill the wine.

  Fifteen minutes later, she sagged against the front door. Her smile at Tim felt like the smile of a Cheshire cat recovering from a bad LSD trip. But Tim seemed barely to notice her paranoid triumph. Instead he pulled her to him and immediately guided her hands under his sweatshirt. It was a sweatshirt she’d just sent him, but he’d cut the sleeves out of it. She was opening her mouth to berate him for ruining a perfectly good piece of clothing, but what was under her hands and before her eyes, and in Tim’s gleaming eyes, all registered at once. “My God, you weren’t kidding when you said you’ve been working out.” She ran her hands over the smooth ridges of his abdomen and hard biceps.

  “You think that’s hard? Feel this.” He pushed her hand down jeans that were sexily loose. He must have lost a couple of inches off his waist.

  She almost forgot what was down her own pants. His cock was as smooth and hard as the rest of him. “Did the guard find this when he strip searched you?” she said against his mouth.

  Tim looked shocked. Angry even. Then he let out a laugh. “No, baby, I saved this for you.” He started to unzip his jeans.

  She pulled away. She hadn’t gone to all that effort and stress for nothing. “Not yet. Let’s wait.”

  “Wait? Are you crazy? I been waiting six weeks. What’s to wait for?”

  There was no better cue. “This,” she said, and pulled out the weighty contents of her pockets and lined them up on the kitchen table: two pairs of beeswax candles, a cassette tape of Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert, a flat packet of bubblebath crystals, and—from a pocket she’d specially sewn into the inside lining halfway down her leg—her coup de grâce: a half-bottle of Valpolicella.

  Tim picked up the wine and held it away from himself as if it were a ticking bomb. “How the fuck did you get this in? Fuck, you’re going to get us in fucking shit.”

  “Stop swearing at me.” She reigned in her temper and reached under his shirt again. “I’m not going to get us in shit,” she said, with a seductive smile. “I’m going to cook us a dinner you’re not going to forget.”

  They had to drink the wine out of tumblers. She fashioned tin foil into candle holders and lit the candles. She stood back and looked at the table with satisfaction. Keith Jarrett was playing on the blaster. She served up the pasta.

  Across the table from Tim she raised her glass. “To us.”

  Tim took a swallow of wine, made a face. “How do you drink this stuff?”

  She watched him swallow another large mouthful. “Don’t drink it if you don’t like it.” She spoke sharply. Had she been a fool? He hadn’t had a drink in fifteen years. Between them one of the candles flickered out.

  She was doing the dishes when Tim came up behind her. In a shot he had her twisted around with her arm pinned behind her.

  She yelled with the sudden pain but couldn’t help the simultaneous electric response in her groin. “What are you doing?”

  “Showing you how strong I’ve gotten. Quick too.”

  In another instant she was on her back, her wrists gripped in Tim’s hands, her sides pinned by his thighs.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  Tim loosened his grip immediately. He eased his weight off her. She started to her feet. And was instantly knocked off them again.

  “Never let up your guard,” said Tim in her ear. “First rule of wrestling.”

  She struggled against his weight. There was a sharp pain in her arm, pinned underneath her. She could feel Tim’s erection through his jeans. “Let me go!”

  “You want romance. I’ll give you romance.”

  “No! Tim! Let me go! You’re hurting me!”

  She sat in the warm bath, hugging her knees to her chin. Watching the shadows from the candles play on walls. Her tears fell into the bubbles soothing her sore limbs. Tim’s remorseful apologies reverberated in her ears.

  He sat on the closed lid of the toilet, his face turned to look at her. In the candlelight, his eyes glistened. In them she could see reflected the tears and love that were in her own.

  11.

  I WOKE UP THE NEXT morning to Steve Quinn’s voice in my head. Not the things he’d said late into the night, but something he’d said when he first arrived at my house: “There’s a million years of debris in those buildings.”

  A million years of debris. The phrase repeated in my head all day at work, like one of the mantras Lucy used to tell me about, chanting behind my thoughts of Quinn.

  I tried not to think about him, but that was a hopeless endeavour. In the sober light of day, I was relieved we hadn’t slept together. God, he’d had to stop me. Thank God he had some self-control. Did they train cops in that too? They were put in some pretty intense situations. Was I just another intense situation? No. I refused to believe that. He’d talked about the future. And not a pie in the sky future either. Not a “some day I’ll leave my wife” future. He was already on his way there. Lucy had waited two years for hers to begin. Would I have to wait that long?

  I stopped that train of thought. None of this was relevant right now. Only Lucy was relevant. Finding her. Convicting Tim.

  Every time the office phone rang, I looked up to see if it was for me. Every hour I checked my messages at home. It was completely irrational. If he was going to phone at all, he would most likely wait ’til evening. If he was going to phone. The fifth time I checked my home answering machine, I was startled to hear the voice intoning that I had “one new message.” Impatiently, I pressed the buttons. But it wasn’t a male voice. It was Anna. Anna! I had forgotten all about her. I had told her I would call her a week ago. I wrote down the
number she’d left. I would phone her tonight.

  I forced myself to work. Accompanied by the incessant mantra: a million years of debris.

  I left the office at four. I headed south in a light rain and heavy traffic on Bank Street. Hunt Club was not quite as busy. I drove past the blackened barns and turned right at the first street. It curved through a suburban neighbourhood northwest of the barns. The houses backed onto a field, which backed onto the Airport Parkway. I couldn’t get behind the houses from here. And I couldn’t see any other buildings. I drove back to Hunt Club.

  I felt self-conscious pulling into the driveway in front of the barns. It was so close to the street. Would Tim, or Marnie, have had the nerve to pull up here? Maybe, in the dead of night.

  I worked up my own nerve and got out of the car. The rain had stopped. We weren’t getting nearly enough for this time of year. Despite the lack of rain, the huge overgrown lilac bushes in front of the car were already in leaf, the buds about to open. Temperatures had soared in the last few days, painting Ottawa in full spring green.

  I walked past the barns, eyeing their charred caved-in walls. I came to the field I had seen from the neighbourhood. To the west were the backyards and the backs of the houses. Their upstairs windows were rows of huge eyes watching me.

  I turned back. And stopped in sudden surprise. In front of me was a small rectangular building. I had walked between it and the barns without even seeing it. How had I missed it? I went back to look from the vantage point of my car. The building was right in front of the driveway, but the overgrown lilac bushes obscured its view.

  The building was, in fact, the garage at the end of the driveway. It had not been destroyed by fire. It was a building a person could walk into: there were three walls and, in front, a mangled metal garage door that didn’t quite shut. And at the side, near the back, a door.

  I wasn’t ready to look inside. I walked all around the building instead.

  More surprises. Beyond the trees on the other side of the garage was a house, with its own driveway—one of the few residences on Hunt Club. If you drove up that driveway, you could nose a car through a narrow opening in the trees and park it behind the garage where it couldn’t be seen.

  I stood behind the garage and glanced down at the overgrown grass rising up around my knees. What I saw caused the hair to rise on the back of my neck. The long grass was pressed down in two defined tracks—spaced the width of car tires.

  And then I looked up. Several trees hugged the back of the garage. They were skinny, spindly trees, with newly unfolding fresh green leaves. Where two or three are gathered, did that constitute a grove? I looked up into the poplars, and I smiled a small sad smile.

  At the side door, I hesitated, then pushed at it. The debris met me at the door—a million years of it, rising a foot deep, covering the entire floor. Exactly as I had seen in my dream.

  My heart began to thud.

  Light filtered into the garage from the cracks in the big metal door at the front. Cracks an animal could squeeze through.

  I didn’t dare go in. I didn’t want to disturb anything.

  But something had been disturbed. Just inside the door, spanning the width of the back wall, was a raised platform, maybe two feet off the ground and two feet wide. It too was piled high with debris. Except at the end closest to the door, a place had been cleared. The dust was swirled as if something had been pressed against it. Something that could have been the size and shape of a small person wrapped in a sleeping bag.

  I felt no fear looking into the garage. What I felt was sick to my stomach. Sick at the thought of Tim casually eating a candy bar while Lucy lay unconscious in a sleeping bag nearby.

  Even stronger was the remorse. At the thought of Quinn and me sitting in a blue unmarked cruiser in the driveway, pointing our headlights, unseeing, at this building, while Lucy lay within fifteen feet of us, grasping at the hope of light through the cracks.

  You may not need me, but I need you.

  I was exhausted by the time I got home. Too exhausted to walk the dogs. I let them out and took a pizza out of the freezer and turned on the oven. The pizza I was going to feed Quinn the previous night. Would things have turned out differently if he had come here? Probably not. I remembered the way he’d checked around the house the night I’d arrived back from Thunder Bay. The electricity in the air. It was better the tension had been broken. The jumpiness that had returned in the car on the way home had been—what? The dregs of former fears. There was nothing to fear in Quinn. He made it okay to feel vulnerable. I smiled, remembering his orders to lock up after he’d seen me to my door. His looking out for my safety was a welcome relief. If he was a little authoritarian about it, I could live with that. He was someone I could turn to, lean on during this time that was becoming more and more traumatic. I should forget about the future. He was what I needed now. But the future wouldn’t go away. Not when he was presenting possibilities himself. It was crazy. I wasn’t even done with Marc yet.

  Maybe you are. Marc isn’t here. Steve Quinn is.

  I was letting the dogs back in the door when the phone rang. I ran upstairs to the office. The call display read Unknown Name/Unknown Number. It could well be Quinn, calling from home. But it was a female voice, with an Irish accent, that asked for me.

  “Speaking.”

  “Ellen. Hello. My name is Bryn O’Connor. I’m calling with regard to the Lucy Stockman case. I’ve just got my private investigator’s licence and I’d like to help. It’s not the money,” she added, “it’s a woman’s thing.”

  Her lilting accent made me want to believe her. But she sounded too much like she was trying to take me into her confidence. I let her talk.

  “I read about the case in the papers a couple weeks back. I contacted Mr. Brennan, but he said he had no money to pay for a private investigator. But he gave me your number—yours and some other friends of Lucy’s. I hope you don’t mind my calling. I understand you were the one who found her car after she went missing.”

  I was silent. Warning bells were going off in my head.

  “I know it’s hard on the phone. Maybe if we could meet?”

  I made up my mind. “I’m sorry. I can’t talk to you right now. I’ll have to think about it.”

  She didn’t press me. But she gave me her phone number, an exchange farther north in the Gatineaus. I would ask Quinn if he knew anything about her.

  The call reminded me about Anna. I rescued the pizza from the oven and went searching in my knapsack for her number.

  She answered on the first ring. “Oh, Ellen, thank you for calling back. I’m sorry to keep bothering you.”

  I assured her it was no bother. I apologized for not having called back sooner. But I didn’t have anything reassuring to tell her. I didn’t have anything I could tell her at all. Just that I knew the police were keeping up the search.

  “I feel helpless being so far away. I keep having these dreams about her.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, in one I asked her, ‘What happened?’”

  “What did she say?” I held my breath.

  “She just kept shaking her head, saying ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’”

  Like Anna didn’t know. Surely this, more than anything, was proof that “my” Lucy was a figment of my imagination. And yet … the garbage I had seen in the garage was exactly as I had dreamt it. The directions I had dreamed had led me there. There was something to all this.

  “Would such a dream be a—a usual thing for you?” I rushed on. “I ask because before Lucy came to me that night and gave me that message to give you, I had never had that kind of dream where someone was speaking to me like that.” I had to stop myself from adding, “Especially someone dead—or nearly dead.”

  “Not usual at all,” said Anna. “But nothing that’s going on is
normal.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  There was a pause, then she said, “I don’t mean this to sound vain, but did you find it odd that you didn’t know who I was? I mean that Lucy never mentioned me—assuming she didn’t.”

  “It was a bit of a surprise to find out she had a sister,” I admitted. “If someone had asked me I would have said she was an only child. I didn’t mean that to—”

  “It’s okay,” said Anna. “We weren’t very close. Lucy was….” She paused again.

  “Self-absorbed?” The word was out before I could stop myself.

  There was a sigh. “That pretty much describes her. That’s why I asked you before if you were sure she said my name in your dream. To be honest, I would have thought I was the last person she would want to reassure.” Her voice started to break.

  I was helpless to say anything. I felt forty or more years of hurt and bewilderment seeping toward me through the phone line.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this isn’t about me. Mostly I just wanted to tell you that you probably have no idea how much comfort I have been getting from that message. That she—oh it sounds silly to say it—but that she would think of me in whatever state she’s in, wherever she is. And this probably sounds silly too, but the fact that you didn’t know who I was makes it seem more real.”

  “That I didn’t make it all up,” I laughed.

  “I didn’t mean it that way.” Her voice was apologetic.

  “It’s okay. You don’t know how much I’ve been wondering if I have been making everything up.”

  “Everything?”

  I hadn’t meant to say that. “I’ve had a few other dreams too,” I admitted. “But nothing that really makes sense. It helps to know you’ve been dreaming about her too.”

  “Do you think she really is trying to get messages to us? I’ve never really believed in this kind of thing.”

  “Me neither. But that doesn’t seem to matter.” We laughed.

  “Thank you, Ellen. Will you keep in touch with me? Let me know if you hear anything?”