Tell Anna She's Safe

by Brenda Missen

  He opened the door for the defence lawyer and his assistant to go past us. He seemed not to care if he was heard. This wasn’t, I told myself, Steve Quinn, the man who was not supposed to be interested in Ellen McGinn. This was Sergeant Quinn, the police detective concerned about a witness who had just been on the stand for two hours. His concern was legitimate. And accurate. The witness could use a drink, and an opportunity to unload the tension of the day.

  At four o’clock on a Friday afternoon in April, the lobby bar at the Lord Elgin Hotel was filled with suited business people and a few casually dressed tourists. Quinn and I settled into two comfortable wingback chairs kitty corner to each other at a round table. He let me order my own drink. A few moments later the waiter set down two single malts in elegant snifters.

  Quinn raised his glass to me. “You can relax those tight muscles, McGinn. You did fine. You were a wealth of information.”

  His reference to my muscles made me blush. I took a swallow of the warm liquid and tried not to watch his lips on the rim of his glass. He had let his hair grow in a quarter-inch or so and had the beginnings of a trim beard. He was blonder than I would have expected. He’d also shed a few pounds. Was looking more relaxed. The strain from last summer seemed to be gone. But the chemistry was still there. Possibly more intense.

  The case was the only safe topic of conversation. I sent a wry look across the table. “I’m not done yet, you know. Blair was having a field day in there, scribbling away every time I said the word ‘dream’ and ‘vision.’ And don’t you think he’s going to take me to the cleaners on the statement I gave the Sûreté? It says nothing incriminating about Tim. He’s going to make it sound like I changed everything in hindsight. God, I wish you guys had taken my statement that first week.”

  “Yeah, too bad we never did. But the last thing Lundy and Roach had time for was running around getting witness statements. They were busy concentrating on Brennan. But I told you before, don’t worry about it.”

  “They probably avoided taking my statement on purpose. They thought it was going to be full of hocus pocus.”

  “Here we go again. Are you still apologizing for being psychic?”

  “I’m not—” I stopped the automatic denial. “I’m just acutely aware that other people might be skeptical.”

  Quinn met my eyes. “That’s their problem.”

  And yours. The thought zinged through my brain like a bullet. For the first time, there was no doubt.

  I changed the subject before he could read my mind. “I’ve been wanting to know. At least can you tell me…. Can we have one of those conversations we’re not supposed to be having?”

  Quinn looked around and seemed satisfied that there was no one who knew us, no one listening. “What do you want to know?”

  “A few things. About Bill Torrence and the forged cheques for one thing. And about the woman who went searching with Tim.”

  Quinn stared at me. “I didn’t tell you about that last summer?”

  “No, you didn’t have much time. Remember?” I looked him in the eye, feeling suddenly bold.

  “Or maybe you were just asking too many questions.”

  “And not getting any answers.” The Scotch was loosening my tongue. I braced myself for the rebuke.

  But he grinned. “Well, you’ll get your answers soon enough in the papers. Bryn’s going to be on the stand in a few days.”

  “Bryn?” My voice was sharp. “Did she have an Irish accent? Was she a private detective?”

  Quinn was nodding, a question in his eyes.

  “She phoned me. Sometime last May. I meant to ask you about her then, but you—I forgot.” Because you disappeared. “I was too scared to talk to her.”

  “You were too scared to talk to anyone,” said Quinn.

  His mocking tone pissed me off. “So, what if I was?”

  Quinn raised his arms in surrender. “Easy, girl. I was just teasing. I’m not putting you down.”

  You are. It was another clear thought.

  I put him back on track. “So it was Bryn who was with Tim, not an undercover officer?”

  “Yes, as you say, she’s a private investigator. She heard about the case and called Brennan. Offered to help him search. But then Lundy and Roach got in touch with her and convinced her to work for them. She went searching with Brennan—the few times he actually went.” He shook his head, smiling. “What a woman. You should get Lundy to tell it. I’m not familiar with all the details of how they set it up, but it’s a pretty amazing story.”

  “But she was with him when they found Lucy’s remains?” I felt sick and angry whenever I thought about the little of Lucy that had remained. It must have been even worse for Bryn, to actually see it.

  “Yes, she was with him.”

  “Did the forensic testing ever reveal anything more?”

  “No, we still have nothing except the teeth to go on.”

  “So she could have drowned.”

  Quinn looked at me, uncomprehending.

  “You said drowning was one of the things that could account for the pink teeth.” In a dry voice I added, “In one of my visions, she’d been put in the river. Remember?”

  “Masham’s a long way from the river,” said Quinn.

  I spread my hands. “You see why I get embarrassed when I talk about the so-called psychic stuff.”

  “But there are parallels. You don’t have to be embarrassed. We think she was strangled in the bath or the shower—that’s water. And remember you talked about her being wrapped in a synthetic material? In the first interview Lundy and Roach did with Brennan, he kept mentioning the shower curtain. Said Lucy had told him to wash it. He said it had torn to shreds in the washer and he’d had to replace it. Lundy and Roach just let him talk. They never questioned him about it, but he mentioned it about three times. Sure enough, there’s a brand spanking new shower curtain in the bathtub when the house is searched. And one or two of the shower hooks were reversed. Which seems very unlike Lucy; from what I understand she was very meticulous. It’s likely the curtain tore when he attacked her. He may well have wrapped her up in it to carry her to the car.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t you remember? I got later that it was a sleeping bag she was wrapped in.” And there was no way I was confusing bath water with a river.

  I looked straight at him. “She could have been taken out of the river. If they realized she had resurfaced.” I hesitated. “I heard a motorboat out on the river a couple of times—in the pitch dark.”

  Quinn was shaking his head. I didn’t blame him. His theory, the cops’ theory, was so logical. So reasonable. Unbelievably reasonable.

  “I’m going to be laughed out of court when Blair brings up my visions. He’ll have a field day.”

  “So what?” There was impatience in his voice. “I’ve told you before, we often use psychics.”

  But you don’t believe them.

  It was another zinging bullet of truth.

  “Well,” I said to test him, “this psychic had it as an accident.”

  Quinn stared at me. His expression said, don’t be naive. But his words were: “What if I told you that on the evening before he called you, the man who is so worried about his missing girlfriend rents a video called Wolf. A video about a werewolf.”

  My stomach turned. “It sounds sick.”

  “Not sick,” said Quinn. “Evil. Do you know what I see when I look in Brennan’s eyes?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t look in Quinn’s eyes.

  “Nothing. This guy is the most evil character I’ve ever dealt with—and I’ve dealt with a lot of bad characters.”

  “Speaking of potentially bad characters. Can you tell me about Bill Torrence?” I wanted to change the subject.

  “What do you want to know?” />
  “Well, I remember you saying he was offering Tim a big loan to pay off his debt to Lucy. Or at least Tim said he was. Was it just a lie?”

  Quinn nodded. “A big fat lie about a big fat mythical loan. We’ve talked to Torrence. He was in contact with Tim at Lucy’s about the cattle transport idea, but Tim turned him down. He never offered any loan at all, let alone one for thirty-five thousand dollars.”

  He told me what he knew.

  *

  SOME NIGHTS TIM DIDN’T COME home. When he did come in, waking her up at dawn, he was drunk or stoned. She stopped asking where he’d been. Stopped reminding him he was violating his parole. He could deal with his parole officer on his own. She wasn’t going to try to make it better.

  No one could make it better for her either. There was no one to call. No one besides Trish. Kevin had all but disappeared. There was no point in calling her father or Anna: what would she say? And Ellen was keeping their relationship brutally professional. Ellen seemed to have barely heard last week when she had asked her to keep an eye out for a cottage in the Gats. Where was Bill Torrence and his money?

  She kept asking Tim. And came upstairs one morning to find him talking in animated tones on the phone. When he got off, he looked ecstatic. He swung her around so fast she got dizzy.

  “What? What is it? Stop!”

  Tim put her down. He was beaming. “Bill’s just leaving Toronto. He’s got a cheque for thirty-five thousand smackeroos. Made out to you, baby. He’ll be here in five hours.”

  She stared at him. Her heart began to pound. In five hours her troubles would be over. She could hardly believe it.

  She couldn’t concentrate on work. She kept looking at the clock. Counting down the hours.

  In three hours she would be celebrating. They would be celebrating. With three hours to go, with Torrence actually on the road, she could buy a bottle of Champagne. That wouldn’t jinx it. It would be perfectly chilled by the time he arrived. They could all celebrate.

  She arrived back from the liquor store with her brown-paper bag. She had splurged on the real thing: Pol Roger, thirty-five dollars. One one-thousandth of the amount they were going to receive.

  Tim was sitting at the kitchen table. He looked up when she came in. His face said it all. “They got as far as Kingston. His wife took sick. Real bad. She was hemorrhaging. They had to go home. She’s got cancer.”

  No. He was not coming. Nothing else registered. The room began to go black at the edges. She almost dropped the bottle.

  “He’s going to come as soon as he can. But he’s gotta look after his wife first. He said maybe in another week.”

  Another week.

  She made herself breathe.

  Okay. She could wait another week. For thirty-five thousand dollars, she could wait one more week.

  She put the Champagne in the fridge.

  *

  QUINN TOOK A LONG SWALLOW of Scotch and set the snifter down. He looked at me. “After he didn’t come, Brennan changed his story to say that Torrence was going to wire the money instead. It was probably Lucy who planted the idea in his thick head—asking why he couldn’t simply wire the money. But the wire, of course, never came either.”

  “What was she planning to do after the money arrived? My sense was she was trying to leave.” I didn’t mention my sense was from one of my first dreams.

  “Brennan, of course, maintains they were going to live happily ever after, that there were no problems, that he had no reason to harm her. But we found evidence that he was, in fact, going to be moving out. Probably at Lucy’s insistence.”

  “Evidence? What evidence?”

  Quinn grinned. “One of the neighbours had the foresight to sneak over to Lucy’s house in the middle of the night and take a green garbage bag Tim had put out for collection the week after she went missing. He brought it to the police and we sifted through it. And voila, we found the torn-up copy of a lease, signed by Tim and witnessed by Lucy. It was dated the nineteenth, the Wednesday before she went missing.”

  “That’s brilliant. Amazing Tim didn’t think to burn it.”

  Quinn snorted. “That would take more brains than Stupid has in his head.”

  “And what about the forged cheques? Where do they fit in?”

  “The cheques.” He nodded. “First there were a couple of cheques he wrote on her account in January and February. She’d taken him off her account shortly before Christmas, so he obviously stole the cheques. They were for something like seven thousand and five thousand dollars. Enough to get her line of credit up over the twenty thousand mark.”

  “But what were they for?”

  Quinn shrugged. “He claims his truck crapped out on him, that he needed a new one right away to keep up with his snowplowing contracts. He’s also claiming Lucy knew about them. It’s all bullshit—they’ve determined her signature was forged. Then there were the Kyle Smythe cheques. The day before Lucy went missing, the Friday, her bank called to say her account was overdrawn, that the cheque she’d received from a Kyle Smythe for a thousand dollars had non-sufficient funds. Lucy told the manager she’d never received such a cheque—didn’t even know a Kyle Smythe. But the bank manager said her signature was on the back of the cheque.”

  “Tim had forged it again? But I don’t understand. Who’s Kyle Smythe?”

  “A friend of Brennan’s. He had Smythe write a bogus cheque, deposited it into Lucy’s account at one machine, and withdrew six hundred dollars from another one. We’ve questioned Smythe. He says he got fifty bucks for his trouble. Lucy must have realized Tim was behind it because she told the manager she’d take care of it.” He took another sip of Scotch and continued. “She probably confronted Brennan, and he probably held the carrot of the Torrence money out to her yet again. He’d been doing it for weeks. That last week, Lucy was calling the bank every day, asking if the wire transfer had been made yet.”

  Oh hi, Ellen, I’m on the other line with my bank manager and it’s taken me ages to get through.

  “She didn’t know before she died that there was a second cheque from Smythe,” Quinn continued. “Also with her forged signature on the back. Brennan had taken out more money against it. That one bounced the following week. So her line of credit ended up being around the twenty-two thousand mark.” He shook his head and muttered, “I hope they hang him.

  “Now,” he said, changing the subject. “I can see you’re going to stew about Blair all weekend. Believe me, he’s not worth it. All you need to do is listen to his questions carefully. Be wary any time he says, ‘May I suggest that….’ Or he may not even start a question that way, but may try to get you to agree to something that goes along with a scenario he’s trying to paint. Don’t let him get under your skin.” He smiled. “You’ll be fine. You could have a support person in the court with you, you know.”

  I shrugged. “I’d prefer not to.” I didn’t want anyone else hearing me being taken to pieces and shown to be a flake.

  “Well, I’ll be there. Look at me whenever you need to.”

  I wasn’t sure that would help, but I gave him a smile.

  Quinn’s expression changed somehow from one of professional interest to personal. “You and what’s ’is name never got back together, I hope.”

  “No, what’s ’is name and I did not get back together.” I was annoyed.

  “Sorry. I’m not trying to be insolent. I just can never remember his name.” His smile was cajoling. “How have you been? You haven’t got anyone new in your life, have you?” His eyes willed me to say no.

  “No, I’m enjoying being on my own.” I was not going to sound like I was waiting. I was suddenly not sure I should be. It was obvious now that he had been humouring me about my dreams and visions. I was back to my confused state: attraction, repulsion, mistrust, desire. What was it with this man? />
  “How’s the new place?”

  “I love it.”

  He was shaking his head. “I still can’t believe you moved just down the road from where you found the car. I suppose you’re communing with Lucy’s ghost or something.”

  “Or something.” I tried to keep my tone light.

  “How’s work going?”

  “Fine. I work more from home now. And I’m doing some writing on my own.”

  “You must be communing with Lucy’s ghost,” he teased. “You’re sounding more and more like her.”

  I started.

  He seemed not to notice. “There’s one way you’re not the same though.” The teasing note was gone.

  “What’s that?”

  “If you got into an abusive relationship you’d leave.”

  I met his eyes. “I don’t know if I would.”

  Quinn glared at me.

  I shrugged. “I’ve learned not to make assumptions—even about myself.”

  “You wouldn’t stay. You’d fight back. You’d get out.” His vehemence took me aback.

  “Well, I can say this much.” I kept my voice calm, if not my thoughts. “I believe I wouldn’t get into an abusive relationship in the first place.”

  Quinn was nodding. “That I believe. You are not going to end up in a pine grove near Masham.”

  His words shook me. But I kept my voice calm. “Exactly where were Lucy’s remains found, anyway?”

  “You mean you’ve never gone to the site?”

  “How could I? I’ve never known where it is. I’ve been wanting to go, but—”

  “You and I will go. After the hearing.”

  My adrenalin started pumping.

  “Or.” Quinn raised his eyebrows as if struck by a sudden thought. “What are you doing this weekend? Tomorrow say?”

  My pulse sped up even more. It made sense for Quinn to take me. I wanted to go. I didn’t want to go alone. He knew the spot. And he was offering.

  “Sorry. Stupid of me,” Quinn was saying. “What you need this weekend is to relax—not go on a morbid hike in the woods. We’ll go after the hearing. Whenever you’re ready.”