Last Song Sung

by David A. Poulsen

  The last thing he went over was the scene outside the window. Across the street and five doors down was the house and yard where Faith’s body had been found. I knew the place, but this was a different view — from the side and slightly above. Kennedy had chosen his home well. The exposure to the scene was perfect: a clear view of the garage in the backyard and the alley behind it. It was there, next to that garage, where Faith’s body had been found the morning after her disappearance, naked and lying under a four-by-eight sheet of plywood.

  Kennedy had been lucky to find a place that offered an unobstructed look at the two places he needed to see.

  “Any questions?”

  “Not about the technology,” I answered him. “I think I’ve got that figured out.”

  “Yeah?”

  “One thing, though. Besides me, how many times in all these years have you seen someone who maybe looked a little suspicious?”

  “Count ’em on one hand.”

  “I don’t know whether to admire you or feel sorry for you for doing this.”

  “Well, let me put your mind at ease. I don’t give a rat’s ass which one you choose. Or what you think of me. This is what I’m going to do until I get that bastard.”

  “And you really think you’ll get him?”

  His shoulders slumped a little, and his voice dropped to a near whisper. “Some days I’m convinced that I’ll never see him, that he’s dead or he’s too smart or, like I said, he had cop help to get away with it and I’ll never get any closer than I am right now.” While he speaking he bent down to look through the video camera. “But there are other times when I know … I can feel it, that he’s still out there and one day he’ll walk into my camera shot and I can spring the trap. By the way, something I forgot — binoculars on that shelf over there.”

  He pointed, and I looked at the shelf he was indicating, saw the binoculars.

  I glanced at my watch. “You better get going.”

  He nodded. “You good?”

  “I’m good.”

  “My bag’s down in the hall. I’ll grab it on the way out. House keys are on the table right by the front door. There’s some stuff in the fridge if you get hungry. I’ll text when I know more.”

  “Listen, Marlon. I got this. Why don’t you just think about what you need to do in Nanaimo? And I want you to know I’m sorry about your wife.”

  “Yeah.” He left the bedroom, and I heard him descending the stairs.

  “One more thing!” he yelled from the main level of the house. “That rifle’s loaded … just so you know.”

  I looked over at the rifle, a .30-06, and was still looking at it when I heard the front door close.

  I walked back and forth between the two workspaces Kennedy had set up in the house. After twenty minutes of that I called Cobb, left a voice mail to say Kennedy had gone to catch his flight and all was quiet. Then I called Jill.

  Though I was fairly sure I’d woken her, her voice gave no sign. I heard, “Hey, cowboy,” after she picked up. “How’s the spying going?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Kennedy’s left for the airport. I’ve been checking the place out. The crazy part is that I can picture myself actually being sort of busy between watching, recording what I see, and checking the tapes to look at what I missed.”

  “No, sweetheart,” Jill countered, “that’s not the crazy part. The crazy part is that you’re in a virtual stranger’s house looking for a clue into something that happened twenty-four years ago.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  She paused. “I’m sorry. It’s not right that I’m making light of it. I honestly feel terrible for that poor man who has given up his life for this. And I’m glad you called. I was kind of worried about you. Everything’s okay over there?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I assured her. “I mean, this feels weird to me too, but I wanted to do this for the guy so he can be with his wife. And what’s weirdest of all, it feels like fishing. You sit there, you haven’t had a bite for hours, but you keep looking at your line in the water like at any second some fish is going to grab the hook, and bingo, you got ’im.”

  “And you think you might see someone who could be the guy?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean no, I don’t really believe that. But I also find it impossible to say I’m not going to see someone. That’s the fishing part. I guess that’s how it must be for Kennedy. Anyway, I miss you and I need to hear the voice of the young lady who lives with you … if she’s up.”

  “She’s lying here right beside me. Wouldn’t go off to her own bed until we’d heard from you. I think she has a crush on you.”

  I heard a “Mom!” in the background and could picture the pained expression on Kyla’s face.

  She came on the line. “I don’t know why you even go out with her.” I could hear the urge to laugh in her voice.

  “I do it only to get her out of the house and give you a break.”

  The laugh surfaced then. We didn’t talk long, but she did tell me she’d thought about it and decided that Mr. Kennedy should not take matters into his own hands. Jill had been right about her daughter’s need to analyze.

  “You’re a terrific kid, you know that? It must be about time we hit Chuck E. Cheese for a night of my beating the tar out of you in every game in the place.”

  “You wish!” She laughed again.

  “You know what I really wish? I wish I could give you a hug right now.”

  “What you have to do is give me a think hug.”

  “And I do that how?”

  “You think about the hug, and I think about the hug at the same time. It’s not as good as the real thing, but it’s better than no hug at all. Wanna try?”

  I wondered if Kyla and her dad used the “think hug” method — then decided it didn’t matter.

  “I sure do,” I told her, and I actually closed my eyes and imagined holding her.

  “Did it work?” she said after a few seconds.

  “You’re a genius,” I said. “I’m not going to be around much for the next little while, so we’re going to have to rely on think hugs, lots of them.”

  “Okay.”

  “Have a good sleep, okay?”

  “You too, Adam.”

  I promised her I would, but as we ended the call I knew it would be a while before I slept.

  For the next three hours, maybe a little longer, I alternated between the upstairs and downstairs locations. I spent more time on the upper level — on the stool and looking some of the time through the camera and some of the time through the binoculars at the garage and the alley behind it — two of the places Kennedy had spent something like half his life watching.

  The stools were the tall kind you see in some bars and coffee places — comfortable for maybe an hour, nasty after that. The best part was the walk between the two surveillance locations when I was able to stretch and rub the numbness out of most of the lower back half of my body. I finally retrieved two of the blankets Kennedy had told me about and manufactured a couple of almost cushions, which helped. I took breaks every couple of hours to do bending and stretching exercises, a new appreciation for Kennedy’s dedication already firmly formed in my mind.

  During the time I was watching from the upstairs perch, I saw one car go down the alley, just before midnight. Nothing and no one else. Sometime around 1:30 in the morning, I checked the cameras to make sure that they were working and properly aimed, that I hadn’t accidentally knocked one off target. Then I went out to the Accord, grabbed my gym bag out of the trunk, and went back inside.

  I checked the kitchen, more out of curiosity than hunger. Kennedy had stocked the place pretty well before he left. I wasn’t surprised by that, except that he would have had to do the shopping between our chat that morning and my arrival that night. Another example of the man’s attention t
o detail.

  I took a shower and, after one last look out of the main floor window at what had been the Unruh house, I headed off to my own bedroom. I glanced quickly at Kennedy’s book collection — almost all non-fiction, with a strong bent toward biography. Again, I was surprised. Being a fiction guy myself, I went to bed with the copy of Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness that I’d brought with me. I fell asleep with the light on and the book still propped on my chest, woke up a while later, and for a minute had to remind myself where I was. I shut off the light and thought for a while, mostly about the fact that I had just completed night number one of my surveillance. Just 8,999 short of Kennedy’s record.

  Five

  The next morning I made a pot of strong coffee and was back at my upstairs bedroom post just after 7:00. I watched the departure of the man who lived in the house where Faith’s body had been found. At 7:34 he came out the back door of the house, walked to the garage, and disappeared inside. A minute or so later, a brown Chrysler 300 backed into the alley, turned left, and headed west, disappearing from view in a few seconds. I noted that the man was thirty-something, wore a good-looking, lightweight suit, and carryied a briefcase. I recorded his departure in the notebook Kennedy used to diarize all “sightings” on either property.

  Seventeen minutes later, a woman came out of the house. She had a little girl in tow, and they, too, entered the garage, then after a couple of minutes drove away, this time in a Nissan Murano. Nice vehicles — this family didn’t appear to have been affected by the downturn in the Alberta economy.

  They were too young to have been living there when the murder had taken place, unless one of them had grown up in the house. I wondered if either of the adults — I assumed they were either husband and wife or live-in partners — was aware that they parked their vehicles just metres from where a little girl just a few years older than their own daughter had lain as the life drained out of her. I wondered, too, whether real estate agents were obligated to tell prospective buyers about horrific events that had taken place in or around properties they were trying to sell.

  I drank coffee and watched for a while longer, then went downstairs. At 8:22, a red Equinox pulled up in front of the house where Faith Unruh had lived. An eleven- or twelve-year-old boy, backpack over his shoulder, dashed from the front door and down the sidewalk and then climbed into the back seat of the Equinox. The boy was dark-skinned, perhaps East Indian or Pakistani. He rapped knuckles with another boy, similar in age and Caucasian, already in the back seat. The driver — I guessed he was the second boy’s dad — pulled away from the curb, and I could see someone else in the passenger-side front seat, an older sister, maybe. All of them were likely heading for the kids’ school.

  I recorded that departure too. I took a break between 9:00 and 10:00 to take in yogourt and a bran muffin and thought about the fact that I hadn’t, during my time in the surveillance rooms, listened to any of my music. Music was part of virtually every one of my days. It had been the therapy I relied on after Donna’s death. Yet it had felt somehow wrong to have even that small pleasure while I looked out these windows hoping to spot a killer. I wondered if Marlon Kennedy looked at his time on the surveillance stools the same way.

  Cobb texted just after eleven o’clock:

  Read again your report on the conversation with the former assistant manager of Le Hibou. Good work. Want to hear your thoughts. Interesting the attitude change in Ellie after she’d played the other club. Might be a good idea to do some checking on the place when you get time. I’ve got a lot on my plate today — some domestic, some case-related. I’ll call when I get some time.

  And that was my morning. For lunch I went down to the kitchen and made myself two baloney and lettuce sandwiches and took them and a Diet Coke back upstairs. But this time I decided to take my laptop with me. I pushed aside cords and power bars and made space on the table that occupied much of the centre of the room. I set up to do a little work on the Ellie Foster disappearance while I kept an eye on the scene outside.

  The afternoon went by surprisingly quickly. I divided my time about equally between surveillance and research, looking, as Cobb had directed, for connections to Ellie Foster’s music career. And I spent a fruitless hour and a half trying to find out something about the coffee house known as The Tumbling Mustard. Found one mention — actually, a poor-quality photo of a poster from the club dated October 17, 1964. It was promoting a singer who called herself Angie. That was it — just the one name. Nothing on anyone named Fayed. I wasn’t sure I’d learn anything even if I was able to track down Mr. Fayed, but I was intrigued by the notion that Ellie had undergone some kind of personality or attitudinal change during or around the time of her Tumbling Mustard gig. Maybe Fayed could shed some light on that.

  On a whim I checked out performers named Angie and actually surprised myself when I discovered a Wikipedia mention of a “Fredericton-born folksinger who enjoyed a brief career in the early and midsixties and retired to a sheep farm in the Shuswap area of B.C.” I tried to find more about the elusive Angie, who may or may not still have been raising sheep in British Columbia, thinking she might be able to direct me toward Fayed, but I turned up nothing. Then I came across a brief notation that offered “prayers and thoughts to the family and friends of Angie Kettinger, the wonderful New Brunswick–born singer who passed away last night in the Salmon Arm hospital at just sixty-six years of age.” The piece, dated April 29, 2011, included details of a memorial service to celebrate Angie’s life and music.

  I was hoping that the passing of Angie Kettinger wasn’t a harbinger of things to come as Cobb and I tried to track people with some knowledge of Ellie Foster’s life and disappearance.

  When I broke for dinner — a pizza warmed up in the oven — I had an almost blank page where I’d hoped several lines of meaningful text would be. After I’d cleaned up the dinner dishes — one plate, one glass, my kind of cleanup — I once again returned to the surveillance locations. As I sat on the upstairs stool looking at the quiet scene that was the house across the street, I realized how little I had accomplished that day. At eight o’clock I broke for a run, weaving my way around the pleasant neighbourhood and passing in front of both of the houses I had been watching on cameras. Back in Kennedy’s house I spent twenty minutes sitting in the dark of the dining room, trying without success to pull together even one thought that would move the Ellie Foster investigation forward.

  After a quick check of the two cameras I was back at my computer feeling, more than anything, useless and depressed. For the next while I again immersed myself in the musical career of Ellie Foster. It wasn’t a long career. She had sung professionally for just over two years, but even in that time — as I read reviews, promo pieces, and comments about her from those who had seen her perform at Le Hibou in Ottawa, the Louis Riel coffee house in Saskatoon, a couple of Toronto and Vancouver clubs, or even Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs, New York — it was clear that a great many people thought she was a special talent.

  There were countless glowing commentaries and predictions of a major musical career that would rival those of Baez and Mitchell. I put in another hour of Google searches and phone calls and finally came up with something. Nothing major, but something. I tracked the number of a former Herald writer who used to write a music column. I’d met Bert Nichol a couple of times, but he’d retired by the time I started at the paper, so I didn’t know him well, and I doubted he’d remember me at all.

  I had no idea how old he was, but I figured old was the operative word. Nevertheless, I hoped he could tell me a little about The Depression … if he was still lucid. And willing to chat. I called the number. It was coming up on ten o’clock, and I knew I was pushing my luck, but maybe the guy was still up and about.

  A woman’s voice came on the line.

  “Hello. Is this Mrs. Nichol?”

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  Ah, careful.
Good girl.

  “This is Adam Cullen. I used to work at the Herald and met Bert a few times, although I didn’t really have the opportunity to get to know him. Right now I’m working with a detective on the Ellie Foster disappearance from 1965. We’ve been contracted by a family member. I was hoping I could speak to Bert if he’s still up.”

  There was a long pause.

  Finally she said, “He’s still up, the damn fool. He watches reruns of those game shows — says it’s research for when he’s a contestant. I think he’s kidding, but with Bert you never know. I’ll take the phone to him.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I’ll take the phone to him. Bedridden? Wheelchair bound?

  A couple of minutes later, a voice that would have fit perfectly on an old 78 rpm record came on the line.

  “This is Bert.”

  I went through the self-introduction again, hoping I wouldn’t have to repeat it a third time. No danger there. Bert was 100 percent sharp. And business-like. Or maybe I was keeping him from one of his shows and he just wanted to get rid of me.

  “What can I do for you?

  “I wondered if you covered The Depression when you were writing music for the Herald and if you could tell me a little about the place?”

  “I didn’t get the music beat until ten years or so after The Depression was gone from the scene.”

  “Oh,” I said, knowing my disappointment was likely evident in my voice.

  “But hell, I guess I knew the place as well as anybody. Went there lots — even took Rose a time or two — that was Rose, my wife, you were talking to before. I saw Ellie Foster perform maybe three or four times. In those days I was just dipping a toe in the music world, and I remember I wrote two or three pieces about her for a couple of smaller music publications — the ones that paid in free copies and once in a while an album in the mail. In fact, me and a couple of friends of mine, we were supposed to be there the night she was kidnapped or whatever the hell happened to her. But one of the Herald sports guys asked me to cover for him. The Saskatoon Quakers were in town to play the Calgary Spurs. Senior hockey. He was supposed to do a piece on Fred Sasakamoose, who was travelling with the Quakers at the time. You heard of Fred Sasakamoose?”