Tell Anna She's Safe

by Brenda Missen

  I promised I would.

  The phone call, and the pizza afterward, reenergized me. I called Belle and Beau. Grabbed their leads. The sun had set; I would take them just to the end of the road.

  But outside, it was darker than I’d anticipated. No moon. I nixed the walk. I stayed up on the deck while Belle and Beau ran down to the yard. I could hear them crashing about in the bushes below, their tags jingling. I crossed my arms over my chest and walked around to the river side of the deck. And heard it again: the unmistakable hum of a motor.

  An electric current of dread zapped through my bloodstream. It was not my imagination. The dogs’ tags jingled somewhere below me on the hill, grounding me in reality.

  Out on the water, the hum continued. It seemed to be out in the middle, straight out from the bay. If there was a light, I should be able to see it. The river stayed obsidian black.

  This time the boat didn’t stop; the puttering continued, getting fainter and fainter, towards the dam to the south. Then silence.

  What would someone be doing out there? This wasn’t the weather for evening outings. And, anyway, not without lights. Was someone out there searching for Lucy in the dark? Why put her in the water and then search for her? And how long did it take a drowned person to rise to the surface anyway?

  The last question, anyway, was a rational one. It would have an answer. It was time to do a little research. Research was something I knew how to do. And reading about drowning shouldn’t scare me.

  I whistled for the dogs.

  Up in my office, I booted up the computer and dialled the modem. My home page came up. I typed the word “drowning” into the search engine.

  The website for the Drowning Accident Rescue Team—DART—seemed as good a place to start as any. I clicked on the link and waited for it to come up on the screen.

  The DART home page appeared on my screen. I clicked on an option called “Rescue vs. Recovery.” I started to read. “The Rescue Call Mode is used when there is a chance to save a human life.” We were definitely past rescue mode. I skimmed to the next paragraph.

  “The Recovery Call Mode is used without the goal of saving a human life.”

  The page went on to give the two scenarios. They both began with a swimmer who begins to tire. I scrolled down the paragraph, reading in horrified fascination.

  “Her breathing comes in short and irregular gasps. She takes a small amount of water into her mouth and she coughs….”

  My muscles tensed. My throat constricted; I had to catch my breath.

  “She flounders for only a few seconds before more water enters her mouth and throat. She begins to cough violently, fighting to keep her head above water. As she coughs, she expels more and more air from her lungs and her breathing becomes shallow, rapid, and less efficient….”

  My chest felt like something was squeezing it. I couldn’t get enough air.

  “She slips below the surface of the water. Sinking slowly, she loses her ability to hold her breath and carbon dioxide build-up forces her diaphragm to contract uncontrollably. A deep inspiration of water occurs.”

  Something was pushing against my lap. The sensation, and the whining, brought me to. I was soaked in a cold sweat, gasping, choking. But I was breathing. Air.

  I sat stroking Beau’s head with shaking, grateful hands. I slowed my breathing, took in the room around me, staved off the panic. I focused on the mundane surroundings of my office: desk, bookcase, patterned carpet on the floor. The experience faded, my body’s responses returned to normal.

  I went downstairs to the kitchen and made a mug of tea. Back at the computer, I cupped my hands around the hot mug, staring at the screen. Then I scrolled back to the top of the page, working up my nerve to read it again, to read to the end this time.

  I made myself reread the description of the girl’s drowning. At the first mention of her breathing coming in short irregular gasps, mine began to choke up as well. I stopped reading and forced myself to breathe normally. I made myself go back to the words on the screen. I read the entire description over and over until I could do it without having a physical reaction. I breathed in deep even breaths. I got to the end of the passage again. I read: “As her desire to breathe comes back under control, dreaming loses its horror.”

  Dreaming?

  I squeezed my eyes shut and then stared back at the words on the screen. “As her desire to breathe comes back under control,” I read this time, “drowning loses its horror.”

  I sipped the tea. The warm liquid filled my insides with calm. I continued with the rest of the description.

  “She sinks faster, not realizing she is quickly losing all voluntary muscle control. In her dazed state she may not feel the effects of the water pressure on her body. She reaches the bottom and as she becomes unconscious, she instinctively grasps at it.”

  On the screen I see the drowning swimmer sink to the bottom of the lake. She’s reaching out, naturally, calmly, for the bottom, as if she has found her resting place.

  She hasn’t, not yet. The current nudges her along, her long dark hair undulating around her head. The current carries her past the weeds that live at the bottom of rivers, past logs that have been down there for twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years. I’m on the water, above, looking down; the water is clear right to the bottom. Crystal clear. I follow her progress. I see the surface landmarks she passes—the village of Wakefield, the cottages lining the river downstream from the village, my own bay. She is carried on her journey just above the river bottom, eyes wide open, but not seeing. She drifts past my bay, on her way downstream. She skirts around a small island and then something reaches out, snags her. An errant branch of a fifty-year-old log. She settles in to wait for new currents to break her loose—currents stirred up by heavy rains. By the time the new currents come for her, she’ll be buoyant, ready to rise to the surface. She’ll join the deadheads somewhere along the shoreline of the big island in the bay above the dam. Then she’ll wait for me to find her.

  I ate my morning toast thinking about the bay above the Chelsea Dam and the big Hydro-Québec-owned island that sat in the middle of it. And divers. I had a specific location now.

  But for divers I would need assistance. To get assistance, I would need to come clean.

  I called the police station and was put through to Sergeant Roach.

  “Can you be here in half an hour?” he asked.

  I could.

  I glanced at myself in the hall mirror before running out the door. I definitely looked more rested than the last time Roach and Lundy had seen me. Did I look different? Did I look like a kook?

  If Roach and Lundy saw a different me, they gave no sign. Nor did they react to my embarrassed admission that I hadn’t been completely truthful about how my information had come to me or in what detail. Sergeant Lundy said “Oh,” and looked a little sad. That was all.

  But they took notes. It was the first time I had seen them take notes. It gave me courage to tell them more. I gave them the new information from my experiences of seeing into the van and from sitting at the computer. I cringed when I used the word “vision” but I had no choice.

  They would, they said, definitely check out the garage. And they talked about putting divers in above the dam. But they didn’t promise.

  What they did promise was that they were going to get Brennan. It was just a matter of time, they said.

  In a break at work later in the morning, I continued my Internet research. There were, I read, no rules about when a body came to the surface. It was putrefactive gas formation that caused the body to rise. The rate at which that happened depended on water temperatures. In warm water it could happen in a couple of days. In winter it might be slowed for weeks or until the spring. It also happened at a slower rate in running water than in stagnant water. And depended on whether the body was weig
hted down, whether it got caught on anything on the bottom. If the body were prevented from rising, the gases that had formed would eventually escape and the body would lose its buoyancy. It might stay down forever.

  The Gatineau was still almost winter cold, I figured. And there was definitely a current. Slow but steady. She apparently hadn’t been weighted down, but a branch had snagged her. It might be awhile before she came up. If she came up at all. If someone hadn’t already taken her out of the river—and that seemed like such a remote possibility—I needed heavy rains to stir up the water and dislodge her.

  At lunch I went downstairs to the “company library.” The musty smell of second-hand books hit me as soon as I opened the door.

  Zak, the pony-tailed owner, looked up from the mountain of books and papers piled on the old wooden teacher’s desk he used as a counter. He nodded when he saw it was me and bent back over his book.

  I went to the fiction wall and found the Cs spread over several floor-to-ceiling shelves. I got the step-ladder to see the top rows. Zak didn’t bother to alphabetize under each letter. If you couldn’t find a book he knew he had, he would simply come over and pull out what you were looking for. But I didn’t want to ask. I wanted to find it myself. Or not.

  I found The Long Goodbye and a few minutes later The Big Sleep. I was almost to the Ds when it jumped out at me: a faded paperback copy of The Lady in the Lake.

  Zak waved me away when I tried to pay. “Bring it back when you’re done.”

  Standard Roots practice.

  I put the book in my knapsack. Preparatory reading for a boat excursion I was going to have to make.

  12.

  THE WEEKEND ARRIVED WITH STILL no call from Quinn. There was no reason he should call. He’d made no promises. Had not, now that I thought about it, even said the non-committal “I’ll call you.” He’d said, “Lock your doors.” I’d said, “Yessir.” Maybe he was taking it literally that we should wait. Would he really curtail all contact until this case was over? I hoped not. I needed him now. But I couldn’t bring myself to be the one to call. Although if the other night had never happened, I wouldn’t hesitate. Damn. Why had I let that happen? I needed him to go out on the river with me.

  I also needed a boat.

  I wished Marc had been able to put in our dock before he’d left. Even more, I wished our neighbours would put their dock in. And their motorboat. It lay upside down beside the dock on shore. I wanted to borrow that boat.

  There was, really, no reason to wait for the boat, or for Quinn. I had a fleet of boats to choose from, in my own front yard.

  I spent the weekend contemplating the idea. But I couldn’t bring myself to take a canoe down to the water. Not yet.

  On Saturday night I was restless. Despite my longest run yet. I came back at eight to discover a Private Caller had phoned not five minutes before. But not left a message. Damn! I was sure it was Quinn. He’d said his number was unlisted. That would probably show up as “Private.”

  I was not going to call him back. I didn’t even know for sure it was him. I needed a distraction. On the night table in the bedroom I found a book I had started, and abandoned, weeks ago: Timothy Findley’s memoir, Inside Memory. I took the book and a cup of tea to the living room couch. I opened it to the page where I had marked my place and forced myself to read. A line jumped out at me. Findley quoting the American actress Ruth Gordon: “Be yourself—but know who you are. Being yourself is not a licence. It’s a responsibility.”

  I couldn’t settle into the book. My thoughts kept spinning around. Quinn, Tim, Lucy…. If Quinn was right, Lucy had already experienced Tim’s violence even when I’d first met her. But she’d looked happy. Maybe physical fighting was “normal” for her. No big deal. But there must have been happy, harmonious times too. Obviously. He’d proposed. I’d seen the glow on her face. It couldn’t have been all bad.

  I forced myself back to the book and eventually dozed off.

  I woke up, much later, to Belle nosing in my lap. The light was still on, the book still in my lap. The blue-lit digital clock on the video player glowed the time: 2:22. I had been out for hours. In a deep—mercifully dreamless—sleep.

  One I was ready to return to. I didn’t have the energy to go up to bed. I set the book on the floor, pulled the afghan over me and reached up to turn off the lamp beside the couch.

  As if one switch had activated another, an eerie light swept through the living room. Then the room was dark again, as if the light had been shut off.

  I shot off the couch and ran to the window. Beside me in the dark, the dogs whined softly. On the road just beyond the front yard shone two small yellow lights. Parking lights. My heart was pumping in my throat. Was it Brennan? His accomplice? Should I call the police?

  Or was it the police?

  On duty? Or off?

  With that thought, my pulse slowed. A little.

  The yellow lights began to move, the vehicle obviously backing up. It was a shadowy black form moving in the black night. But not a truck. Not a van. A car, possibly compact.

  The car backed down the road, hesitated for a moment, then the headlights came back on and swung in erratic curves—the car turning around. The lights moved down the road and disappeared around the bend.

  When I was sure it was gone, I went upstairs to check the phone in my office. The light was flashing. And the call display again registered a Private Caller. At 10:19 and 10:47 and 11:55. Now I was sure my Private Caller was Quinn. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard the phone. Clearly, I had been in a deep sleep.

  I retrieved my messages. There was only one. “Ellen. I’m worried about you. Call me, no matter how late it is.”

  I was pleased to hear his voice. But it made me more certain the car had been his. And that made me uneasy—that and the usual bossiness. Tonight it bothered me. I didn’t have to report to him. But these were, I reminded myself, “extraordinary circumstances.” A cop checking on me was not a bad thing.

  I waited twenty-five minutes. Long enough for him to get home, if it had been him. And then I called.

  He sounded out of breath when he answered. As if he’d run up the stairs to catch the phone. I felt a small feeling of triumph. The car had been his. I was sure now. But he didn’t have to know I knew.

  “I was asleep,” I explained. And then suddenly felt bold. “Were you calling for a reason?”

  “Just keeping tabs on you, McGinn. Making sure you’re keeping out of trouble.”

  “And if I weren’t?” I matched his light tone. “Would you come and visit me in a medium-security prison?” I might as well have been suggesting we meet in the fuck trailers. At almost three in the morning, it seemed I had no control over my tongue.

  “I can’t imagine you’d do anything that would get you to medium security. You’re no more than a minimum-security gal.”

  “Oh yeah? Says who?”

  I could hear the smile in his voice. “Says me. You’re a pussy cat. I’d put you in Pittsburgh. Anyway, it would be more convenient to visit than Warkworth.”

  “How can Pittsburgh be more convenient than Warkworth?”

  “Not the city. It’s a minimum-security institution near Kingston. That’s where Brennan was for the last six or seven months of his term. He got transferred sometime in the fall.” He didn’t sound like he wanted to talk about Tim. “I’d be very happy to drive to Pittsburgh to see you. The only problem would be there wouldn’t be anywhere private for us to visit.”

  The suggestiveness in his voice unnerved me, but I couldn’t help asking what he meant.

  “Just what I said. There aren’t any PFV facilities there. You have to go next door to Joyceville. Joyceville’s medium security, like Warkworth, but that’s one scary place. You’d have to submit to a body search.”

  A body search. I couldn’t imagine Luc
y submitting to a body search.

  “She didn’t,” said Quinn, reading my thoughts. “At least that’s what I understand.”

  “They didn’t have PFVs after he got there? But then how….” I was mentally matching timelines with something Lucy had told me.

  “How what?”

  “Well, Lucy told me she had a pregnancy scare that spring. We talked in May and I’m sure she said it had been a couple of months before that. He must have been in Pittsburgh by then. So how—”

  “Could she have had her pregnancy scare?” I could hear the amusement in Quinn’s voice. “Use your imagination. Minimum-security institutions are about minimum supervision. Sounds like she had more balls than I’ve given her credit for.”

  More balls than you have, I wanted to say. It was time to end this conversation before I really got myself into trouble. I thanked him for checking on me and we said good night. I wasn’t sure whether I should have thanked him. Whether I wanted to encourage him. I should be getting used to these internal contradictions. I should also be reconciling them.

  Know who you are.

  The canoe sat half in, half out of the water on the grassy shore. The early morning sunlight bathed the faded red paint of the canoe in a surreal glow. My heart was beating as if I were five kilometres into a run. I had not picked the lightest canoe to carry down the path from Marc’s rack. I had picked the heaviest. Intentionally. An old reliable fibreglass tub. I squatted beside it, one hand on the gunwale, the other rubbing my shoulders.

  I glanced over at the neighbours’ motorboat. There was so much more to it, more surface in the water, more stability. I wished it was ready for use. But wishing wasn’t going to change anything.

  I looked back at the canoe and then out at the river beyond the bay. A fine mist rose off a mirror of blue and green. This was safe, flat, still water. I wasn’t going to tip. I wasn’t going to fall in. I wasn’t going to drown. I was going to be fine.

  I stood up and zipped up my life-jacket. I took in, and released, a breath. I pushed the canoe farther into the water. Then I laid the paddle across the gunwales and stepped in, bracing myself with the paddle stem the way Marc had taught me. As I did so I pushed off with my foot, to launch the boat completely. So far so good.