Tell Anna She's Safe

by Brenda Missen

  Lucy Stockman, neurotic. Did she invent problems where there were none? Were her ailments all in her head? I looked straight at Mr. Blair. “I would not describe Lucy as neurotic.”

  Mr. Blair changed tactics. “To return to your statement you made to Agent Godbout. You stated that Lucy told you that she thought Mr. Brennan was a very gentle soul.”

  “That’s right.”

  “In fact, you related to this court that that was what you saw too—when Lucy showed you a picture of Mr. Brennan in her kitchen.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have used the term ‘gentle soul’ myself.”

  “But you saw kindness, gentleness….”

  “Yes, I did. It changed after—”

  “Well, I’m sure it changed after you had begun to have hallucinations.”

  My stomach knotted. “It changed after I saw—”

  Blair didn’t give me a chance to finish. “Now I just want to go through with you what happened—”

  The Assistant Crown stood up. “I wonder if my friend would let the witness continue her answer.”

  Mr. Blair made a gesture of acquiescence.

  “It changed….” My mind went blank. “I didn’t see it the night we found the car,” I finished. It wasn’t what I wanted to say.

  “Well, we’ll get into that,” said Blair. “I just want to go through the events you related to us with respect to the scene when the Suzuki was recovered. You’ve told us you had to very carefully give Mr. Brennan directions, because you understood that he had a bad sense of direction, you’d been told that by Lucy before.”

  One by one, Mr. Blair took me through all the ‘odd things’ that Deanne Fortier had asked me about. The questions droned on and on. There seemed to be no point in them. No obvious winner, no obvious loser in each exchange. I couldn’t figure out where he was trying to go, what he was trying to get me to say. The effort of listening to his words, and weighing mine, was exhausting. But it was a relief to be staying on the track of the ‘odd things.’

  “You told the court that after you invited Mr. Brennan back to your house, on the way back it suddenly crossed your mind that ‘This man has killed somebody before and am I being stupid inviting him back to my house’—that sort of thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “But all the time Tim was with you—at the site, in your house, you described to us how shaky and teary he was—genuinely upset.”

  “He seemed upset,” I said.

  “Yes, you say that now. But it didn’t occur to you at the time that it was anything but genuine. In fact, in a conversation with your friend that evening you say to her—” He glanced at his notes and quoted my words: “‘Either he’s innocent or my world has turned upside down and I can’t trust my judgement anymore.’ Is that correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Your judgement at that time, from everything you had observed, what you had seen, how he had reacted, how he had conducted himself in your presence up to the late hours of the evening of the twenty-fourth when you called your friend, your judgement told you that he was innocent.”

  I stared at him.

  “Clearly, what you were telling your friend was that your judgement told you from everything you had observed about him, how he had reacted, his demeanour, everything else, what he said, what he did, told you that, ‘No matter what he might have done before, I don’t believe he had anything to do with Lucy’s disappearance.’ That is what you were saying, isn’t it?”

  This time his words shocked me into speaking. “No, that is not what I was saying. I was saying that my world could very well have turned upside down.”

  “Well, of course. But your judgement that you’re referring to—‘either I can’t trust my judgement or he’s innocent.’”

  “That’s right.”

  “So your judgement was telling you that he’s innocent. Isn’t that what you’re saying?”

  “My judgement was telling me that I’d picked up nothing from him indicating that he was guilty.”

  “Ms. McGinn, your recollection of your words to your friend is very precise. And most important, you spoke these words before you had your dream, whatever you’re calling it, about Lucy.”

  My stomach muscles tightened again. “Yes, I was speaking to her before that happened.”

  “You seem like a person who has good judgement; you trust your own judgement. In your estimation, Mr. Brennan was innocent.”

  “I didn’t say that I was judging him innocent.” Suddenly, I was angry. “I said either he’s innocent or my world has turned upside down.” I looked straight at Mr. Blair. “I was quite prepared for the fact that my world might have turned completely upside down.”

  There was a silence in the courtroom.

  Mr. Blair put on his glasses to consult his notes. He took them off and looked up at me. “These dreams you had—although a couple of them were actually, you said, hallucinations of some kind. Can you describe exactly what happens to you when you have these hallucinations?”

  The anger was gathering force. “First of all, I object to you calling them hallucinations. It makes it sound as though I am on some kind of drug or seeing things that aren’t there.”

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Blair. “And what would you have us call them?”

  “Visions.” I spoke the word without hesitation, or embarrassment.

  “And tell us what you understand the difference to be between a vision and a hallucination.”

  “Technically, I don’t know if there is a difference. I just know the connotation attached to each and the disparaging tone in your voice when you say the word ‘hallucination.’” I didn’t hide the anger in my voice. It wasn’t a defensive, explosive anger. It was right—righteous anger—even if I was going to get cited for contempt of court.

  “Very well, Ms. McGinn,” said Blair in a cold voice. “Please explain, then, what happens to you when you have a vision.” His intonation of the word was no less disparaging. But I ignored the bait.

  I took a breath. “It usually happens—not always, but usually—either just before I go to sleep or just as I’m waking up. I am in some kind of altered state—I’m neither asleep nor awake. It’s like a waking dream. Except the events are not the fantastical events of dreams that make no rational sense when you wake up. These events are real, logical. I am somewhere else. I am seeing things that are happening to someone else, somewhere else—or that have sometime in the recent past happened to someone. I am watching. An observer of events. A couple of times it’s happened when I’ve been fully awake—I mean in broad daylight, outside. Those times there’s no question of it being a dream.”

  I’d had no idea I could come up with such a rational explanation of my experiences. I felt an odd triumph. It was—I knew—lost on the court. I didn’t care. I took a breath and looked straight at Blair. “And then there have been a few times when someone has visited me.”

  “Like Lucy Stockman.”

  “Yes. The first time it happened it was more like a dream, but after that it was obviously a visit—she was in the room with me. She was giving me messages.”

  Mr. Blair looked at me for a moment as if he was going to challenge me, then he looked down at his notes, and back up at me. “And so, on the night of the twenty-sixth, you have a visit from Lucy Stockman, who has just gone missing. And she essentially tells you Mr. Brennan had done it, and on the strength of that you went to the police station in the middle of the night. And you spoke to—I think you said it was Sergeant Quinn you saw there.”

  Mr. Blair looked around as if he were going to have me identify Quinn. He swept his eyes over Counsel and turned back to me.

  “Yes,” I said of the ghost in the room.

  “And I think you said you told Sergeant Quinn that you had a dream, not a vision or a visit. Wou
ld you not agree with me that you were reluctant to tell Sergeant Quinn about your—experience—because you were skeptical about what you had seen, and, more importantly, what you had heard?”

  “Yes, I admit I was skeptical.” It was my first smile of apology.

  “And you were skeptical because your experience before this—vision—your experience in the first few hours that you had been in Mr. Brennan’s presence was that your judgement told you he was innocent.”

  I was not going to get side-tracked into a discussion of my judgement again. “No, that was not why I was skeptical. I was—”

  “You were skeptical because Mr. Brennan had behaved in a way that completely correlated to a man shaken by—”

  Deanne stood up again. “Your Honour, again, may I ask my friend to allow the witness to finish her statement.”

  All eyes were on me.

  I breathed in and out deeply. I gave myself time to consider my answer. I said, “I think the more accurate answer is not so much that I was skeptical as that I was frightened. This was the first time this had ever happened to me. I wasn’t sure what to make of it.”

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Blair.

  “Believe me, I wanted to ignore the whole experience. But I couldn’t. I told Sergeant Quinn I had had a dream in which I’d heard an anonymous voice speaking to me because I didn’t think he would give any credence to a real visit, especially from Lucy herself. And I really wanted him to believe what he was telling me because—because I thought Lucy was still alive at the time….” My voice broke. “And I … wanted her … found.”

  “Are you okay?” asked Mr Blair. “Do you want to take a break? I only have a few more questions.”

  I wiped my eyes. “No, I’ll be okay.”

  “I just want to pursue that for a moment, though, if you don’t mind, if you want to take a break.”

  The clerk was suddenly standing before me with a box of tissues and a smile of sympathy. I took a tissue and thanked her. I blew my nose. I looked back at Mr. Blair. “No, it’s okay, I’m alright.”

  It was the truth.

  “Okay,” said Mr. Blair. “I understand that in your dream or visit from Lucy Stockman, whatever you wish to call it, she more or less told you Mr. Brennan was responsible. Is that it?”

  “Yes. I guess what I haven’t explained is that it wasn’t clear to me whether Lucy was alive or dead—she seemed to be hovering on the brink, but Tim was clearly responsible for the state she was in, and that’s why I went down to the police station in the middle of the night. I wasn’t really concerned about Tim at the time. I was concerned with finding Lucy and making sure she lived. I wanted Sergeant Quinn to go to this place to look for Lucy.”

  “Lucy gave you a specific location, then, did she?”

  “No, not that specific. It’s hard to explain. She indicated a distance to go down Bank Street, down in the Hunt Club area, and said she was in some kind of abandoned outbuilding.”

  “Some kind of abandoned…?”

  “Outbuilding.”

  “Outbuilding, okay. And did she give you a description of the physical layout of the place or the physical surroundings?”

  “Yes, it was supposed to be in a wooded area.”

  “Okay, thank you. Those are all the questions I have.”

  I was, in quick succession, surprised, relieved and disappointed.

  The judge looked over to Deanne. “Any re-examination?”

  Deanne stood up. “Just one question.”

  She turned to me. “Mr. Blair made reference to a conversation you had with your friend in which you said ‘Either he’s innocent or my world has been turned upside down and I can’t trust my judgement anymore.’ And I think you mentioned in reference to that that you had started to change your mind about Tim somewhere along the line. The question is: at which point did you start changing your mind about Tim and why did you change your mind?”

  I knew why she was asking this question. She wanted to show that despite any questionable visions, I had already begun to have inner doubts about Tim. I didn’t blame her for asking. I responded calmly. “It was that first evening, after I invited him into my home. He had made all these phone calls, and I’d made him tea, and at intervals he would cry and be upset, and at one point when he was crying I had this thought that I wanted him out of my house. It was very fleeting and brief and not like me—I was shocked I would have that thought about someone who was so obviously upset. But when I remembered it later, I wondered if it was a message to me to be careful, that they might be crocodile tears, that he was not all he seemed.”

  Deanne turned to the judge. “I have no further questions, Your Honour.”

  The judge turned to me. “Thank you, Ms. McGinn. You are free to go.”

  I was almost sorry. I had just been getting warmed up.

  I was shaking on my way out of Courtroom 32.

  Al Lundy was right behind me. “Can I get you a coffee?” he asked.

  I laughed. “Coffee! I need a drink!”

  Lundy took me down the escalator to the cafeteria in the atrium on the lower level. He led me over to the fridge of juices. He made a sweeping gesture with his hand. “We got the full range of single malts right here.”

  I picked out a single malt apple. A poor substitute for the real thing.

  Lundy found a table away from the others in the cafeteria. “Sorry,” he said. “The Crown’s got Roach runnin’ around and we have to be somewhere in half an hour. Going to have to take a raincheck on that lunch. This is the best I can do.”

  Under the circumstances, I didn’t care. Except the juice wasn’t having the desired effect.

  Lundy watched me raise the juice bottle to my mouth with both hands wrapped around it. “That bad, eh? Sit tight, I’ll be back in two shakes.”

  Eight minutes later a styrofoam cup was placed on the table in front of me. There was an inch of golden liquid in the bottom of the cup.

  I looked up at Lundy. He nodded down at the cup. “Grade A apple juice.”

  The liquid warmed my throat on its way down and stopped my hands from shaking.

  Lundy sat down. “Our Senior Assistant Crown Attorney keeps a stash in his bottom drawer.”

  “For himself or the witnesses?” The Senior Assistant Crown Attorney didn’t strike me as a Marlowe type.

  “Let’s just say it’s communal.” Lundy winked. Then his expression changed and he looked at me for a long moment. When he spoke, I had to lean forward to hear. “The only person we don’t let into the stash,” he said, “is Sergeant Quinn.”

  I started.

  He kept his eyes trained on mine. “It’s actually not so much alcohol that was—is—his demon. But an addict will take anything they can get.”

  “Addict?” It didn’t come out in the casual tone I was trying for.

  “Don’t worry, he’s fine now. But—” He interrupted himself. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I think maybe you need to know it more than I shouldn’t be telling it to you, so I’m going to tell you.” He paused and looked at me.

  I met his eyes. Barely breathed.

  He sighed. “He got into a bit of trouble a few years back. When he was in the drug unit.” He shook his head. “It’s like a doctor having access to all those pills. Too tempting. Force turns a blind eye if it can. But Quinn was getting out of hand. Erratic.”

  I held my breath then.

  “His wife threatened to leave him if he didn’t get help.”

  “I assume he did get help?” My voice cracked.

  “Yes, into rehab. Thanks to Ellen.”

  “What d’you mean?” I tried, and failed, to keep the guilt out of my voice.

  “Ellen—his wife.” He shot me a glance. “I guess he never mentioned the coincidence.”

  �
��No.” But a fragment of conversation had come back to me. I’ve begun to realize not all Ellens are created equal. And the familiar way he called me “El.” I was almost more shaken by this information than the other. Just who had I been for Quinn?

  “So, she got him in rehab,” I prompted.

  “Yeah—couple years back now. He was in for six weeks. Then on leave for a few more months. Then he came back on the force—on limited hours. Beginning of last year. Desk duty.” He shook his head again. “That’d be enough to send me around the bend. I don’t know what he was doing there the night you came in. I didn’t think they had him on nights yet.”

  At one time I would have been surprised to hear he’d been at the station at a time he wasn’t supposed to be. Now it was clear we’d had an appointment with destiny. Possibly arranged by Lucy herself.

  “You said his wife threatened to leave him. Did she—did they work it out?”

  Lundy was watching my face.

  And now I saw it. Nothing got past him. He had seen it all: my relief that Quinn wasn’t coming today. My reaction about his addiction. My start at the use of my name. My curiosity about his ex-wife. This was why Lundy thought I should know. Not to tell tales on Quinn or to warn me off because my interest in him was out of line. He was concerned. Concerned about me.

  He heaved a sigh that expanded his belly. “She left him while he was in rehab. But they never got divorced. She came back after a year—after he got clean. That was late last summer. But it’s looking rocky again. I’m not sure what’s going on right now. Quinn’s pretty close-mouthed about it.” He paused and spoke in a voice that matched the compassion in his expression. “And you will be too, won’t you?”

  I nodded and tried to convey my appreciation in my own expression. But my mind was reeling. They never got divorced. She came back. That, not just the case, was why he’d stopped seeing me. My brain felt like someone had fired a stun gun at it. I downed the last of the Scotch.

  Lundy was looking at me again. A little harder this time. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a card. He clicked a ballpoint pen, scrawled a number. Handed it to me. I was having a déjà vu.