In the Grip of It

by Sheena Kamal

“Wait.” Vikram reaches over pulls the camera off my neck. “You call the cops and we’ll tell them you were a trespasser.”

  “I wonder what they’ll say about the grow op at the yoga retreat.”

  “What grow op?” asks Wanda, her voice flat and hard. She nudges me with the gun. “This time don’t come back.”

  I open the door and am halfway out of the truck before something occurs to me. I turn to Wanda. “Is that thing even loaded?”

  “Of course it is,” she lies. Then she jams the gun into my arm, pushing me off balance, half in, half out of the vehicle. Vikram puts the truck into reverse, tumbling me out for good, and backs onto the main road. I’m left sprawled in the dirt, stunned by the swiftness of it.

  It takes me about five minutes to get off the dirt road and back to the main one, with the ocean behind me. I don’t want to look at it now, at night with no one else around. There are no houses around here, nothing but a sliver of moonlight to guide me. I try to reach Leo a few times, but the calls go straight to voice mail.

  There’s a moment of inner struggle, then I call emergency services and tell them I think a child is in danger at Spring Love Farm, and that he has been exposed to hallucinogenic drugs. I don’t feel better about it after I hang up, that sad, somewhat defeated look in Trevor’s eyes heavy on my mind.

  At least I don’t have long to think about it. A car approaches, the same one that I’d seen coming down the gravel road at the yoga retreat. It stops in front of me.

  Leo rolls down the window and sticks his head out. “You alright, Nora? I thought I saw you in the passenger seat of that pickup but that goddamn hippie almost blinded me with his high beams.”

  When Vikram flashed his high beams and I saw Leo throw his arm up, I knew he’d come looking for me. “I’m fine. Did you see Cheyenne and Trevor when you drove up to the retreat?”

  “Just now? No. Why?”

  So Cheyenne must have pulled Trevor into the trees. I thought I’d seen that. “We have to get back to Spring Love,” I say, as soon as I get into the car.

  “Why? What did you find?”

  I tell him about the grow op and the treatments. “Cheyenne’s going to run with Trevor.”

  “Makes sense,” Leo says, nodding. “That’s probably why they drove you all the way out here, to buy themselves some time to get him away.”

  “If I was in her position, it’s what I would do. In her mind, she’s getting treatment for her condition, but from a court’s perspective, she’s experimenting with psychedelic drugs and there are drugs on the premises. It will go badly for her in the custody case unless she and Ken come to some kind of agreement.” But it’s Trevor who’s on my mind, caught up in all this mess through no fault of his own.

  “Can you prove it?” Leo asks.

  “They took the camera you gave me.” But I scroll though the photos on my phone, which I switched to in the grow room because the memory card in the digital camera was full. When Vikram pulled the camera off my neck, I let him because I knew the important photos weren’t there. There’s nothing a phone camera can’t do these days. The pictures are incredibly detailed. Of the small-scale grow op, the lab equipment, the studio where Vikram and Wanda’s “treatment” takes place.

  “Can you go any faster?” I ask him, as he drives toward Spring Love.

  “No, I’m having a tough time navigating these damn roads as it is. I spent most of my day getting lost, actually. When I got to the retreat they were immediately suspicious, but let me in the door because I said I heard about the place from Liz Rathburn. That’s the only name I’d found online, of someone who’d actually been there. I had a little session with Wanda. She asked about the therapy I’d had in the past, and if I was on medication. She wanted detailed information about my mental-health issues and, after about twenty minutes, she kicked me out. Said she thought there’d be a cancellation but the last person showed up. I think she was trying to see if I really knew the Rathburn woman and decided I didn’t.”

  “She probably didn’t want to take any chances. Seb says you weren’t answering your phone.”

  He shrugs. “I took a wrong turn getting here and running maps on my phone drained the battery, then I took a few videos of the property and recorded the interview with Wanda. By the time I got back to the car, my battery was dead and I left my charger back at the inn.”

  “I found it.” That’s why I wasn’t too worried when I hadn’t heard from him.

  “We should call Ken Barnes,” Leo says.

  “He’s not answering,” I say, after several attempts.

  We get lost twice on the dark roads while I try to reach Ken Barnes, so I stop calling him and use the map services on my phone instead. When we finally pull up to the yoga retreat, all the lights are off in the building and every single luxury vehicle that had been parked on the road is gone.

  We drive to the main compound to look there, with no luck. There is no sign of Vikram, Wanda, Cheyenne, or Trevor.

  They have disappeared—like the migrant workers they’d used to keep up the appearance of being a working farm—with a speed that astonishes both me and Leo. Which makes us realize they must have had yet another backup plan in place all along.

  Chapter 12

  Ken Barnes calls back before the authorities show up at Spring Love. I tell him to activate the GPS tracker he must have put on Trevor’s phone. There’s a brief pause but he doesn’t deny that he keeps tabs on Trevor’s whereabouts. What’s the point of having children if you can’t surveil them without their knowledge? “What’s happened?” he asks finally. “And how did you know he has a phone? That’s supposed to be a secret. I didn’t want Cheyenne to take it away from him during one of her insane anti-technology rants.”

  I tell him I’ll explain everything once he’s located the phone.

  When the police get to Spring Love, Leo takes over and sends me to sit in the car, citing my abrasive personality when dealing with authority figures.

  Which is fair.

  They find Vikram, Cheyenne, and Trevor heading toward the south point of the island in the Spring Love pickup. All that was left in the grow room at the retreat was the freezer full of mushrooms, left behind in haste. The other Spring Love hippies swear they don’t know a thing about any of it and claim, with perfectly straight faces, that they have no idea where Wanda Washington is.

  Our ferry the next day is delayed. When we finally get on the damn thing, Leo is as exhausted as I am, even though no one has poisoned him, forced him into a vehicle at gunpoint and dumped him on a secluded road. Ken Barnes flew over on the seaplane this morning—a luxury that I would have gladly accepted if it had been offered to me. But such is not my luck.

  Leo excuses himself to take a call but returns a few minutes later to hand me the phone. “It’s for you,” he says.

  I take it from his hands. “Hello?”

  “Hi,” says Trevor.

  “Hey. You with your dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “With Vik. She and my dad had a big fight and she’s letting me spend the rest of the summer in Vancouver with him. She says I can take the guitar with me. I already asked her.”

  “Maybe you’ll be an expert by the time you have to go back to school.”

  “Maybe,” he says doubtfully. “Hey, what’s your favorite guitar solo?”

  “‘Rumble.’ By Link Wray. When it first came out it was banned on the radio because they thought it was too dangerous.”

  “How could it be dangerous?”

  “Lots of people used to think music was dangerous because it makes you feel things that they sometimes don’t like you to feel.”

  There’s a pause on the other end of the line. “My mom feels things she sometimes doesn’t like to feel,” Trevor says, after a moment.

  Shit. This isn’t what I wanted. “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “It’s okay.”

  I don’t know what else to say, only Trevor is sile
nt again and I really am sorry I made him feel that way. “Do you still have my number on your phone? The one your dad gave you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When you listen to ‘Rumble,’ send me a message and tell me if you think it’s dangerous.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be waiting for it.”

  We hang up after that. I hand the phone back to Leo. “Did Ken say what’s going to happen to Cheyenne?”

  “Well, the police are involved now but Ken says she’s denying everything. When they picked her up last night, she claimed they were just going for a drive and they had all their stuff with them because they’d planned to go camping the next day.”

  “What about the photos I took?”

  Leo rolls his eyes. “Apparently you walked in on one of their standard meditation sessions and she had no knowledge of a freezer upstairs. She told the police the room where they found the freezer was mostly Wanda’s domain and she only ever used the studio to do yoga.”

  “Did they buy that? With Vikram’s history?”

  “No one has arrested either of them yet, so yes. I imagine so. But Ken has what he needs for the custody case, so our part is done.”

  After awhile I let it go, too. Quiet, solitary Trevor isn’t my child. I don’t know my child, only that, to the best of my knowledge, she’s safe. Somewhere in Toronto, with her adoptive mother. Hopefully somewhere as accepting as Salt Spring was in the 1920s.

  I keep thinking of that photo from 1929, of the schoolkids. It would be nice if the place where Bonnie grew up was as harmonious as Salt Spring Island once claimed to be. When I went looking for her, it turned something inside me. I think about her now, and worry about her environment, where before I never allowed myself to. In the quiet moments of the day, when I’m not busy at work, I walk with my dog and let my mind wander in her direction. Before she left for Toronto she hadn’t wanted to see me. That’s okay. I know she might never want a relationship. If I’m honest with myself, I wouldn’t know how to start.

  Leo seems to be in an odd mood today. We stand by the railing, Leo and I, and watch as the ferry pulls away from the harbor. I am looking for whales, as I’ve recently become obsessed with them. Leo is staring out into the distance, but I sense he has turned inward. Pensive. Absorbed with something I can’t see.

  As the ferry cuts through the ocean, heading toward Vancouver, I get a text from a Toronto number I don’t recognize. It’s a photo of a young woman’s feet buried in sand, as water washes over her ankles. I’ve never seen these ankles before, but something about this photo arrests me. Then I realize it’s not the picture itself. It’s who must have sent it. I can’t explain this feeling, but I know somehow this photo is from Bonnie, my estranged daughter. It’s the first time since she’s found out who I am that she’s attempted to contact me. There are no words, but I really don’t need them.

  Suddenly, the sadness of the man at my side can’t touch me.

  Acknowledgments

  I spent a few months on Salt Spring Island, back when I’d first moved to the west coast. During the time I lived there, I had no idea it had such a rich cultural history.

  Liberties were taken in describing certain aspects of the island, naturally, but the photograph Nora sees in the archives is real and is included in a book by Evelyn C. White called Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: A Photo Narrative of Black Heritage on Salt Spring Island.

  British Columbia does have an interesting history with psychedelic drug research, which may be seeing something of a resurgence. I am indebted to Travis Lupick for his reporting on this subject in the Georgia Straight.

  An Excerpt from It All Falls Down

  Read on for an excerpt from the gripping new thriller featuring Nora Watts

  IT ALL FALLS DOWN

  By Sheena Kamal

  Chapter 1

  When they erected their first pop-up tents to treat the addicts who wandered in and out like living corpses, I thought: Sure.

  When the newspapers ran article after article about the opioid addiction taking the city by storm, it was more along the lines of, No kidding. Nothing slips past you guys.

  But when the mental-health infrastructure became obsessed with the zombies, I had to put my foot down.

  Nobody cared about my griping.

  With all these people addicted to addicts now, where are the humble murderers of the city supposed to turn for our mental-health support? I ask you. We have been reduced to complaining about it in our weekly meetings. Not that there are murder support groups in Vancouver. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Alternative outlets for the murderous of the city are sadly lacking. Private therapists can cost an arm and a leg—so to speak—and it’s not like you can find community discussion groups on the topic, either. The closest I’ve found is one for people with eating disorders, but I don’t expect people who have done terrible things to their appetites to understand that I killed a person or two last year. In self-defense, but still.

  During my share, I settle for telling my fellow nutjobs that I feel like I’m being shadowed by my demons, and they nod in understanding. We are strangers who all know one another’s deepest secrets, bonded in the sacred circle of a urine-stained meeting room in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. They lift their anemic arms in polite applause afterward and we disperse from the collapsed circle. We are, blessedly, strangers again.

  The feeling of being watched follows me from the low-income Eastside Vancouver neighborhood I frequent back to the swanky town house in Kitsilano that I now occupy some space in. I drive with the windows up because the air is thick with forest-fire smoke from Vancouver’s north shore, smoke that has drifted here in pungent wafts and settled over the city. It doesn’t help that we are experiencing one of these new Octobers that doesn’t remember that there’s supposed to be a fall season and is almost unbearably hot for this time of year.

  As I drive, I obsess over still another death. One that hasn’t occurred yet. But it will.

  Soon.

  Chapter 2

  When I get back to the town house, Sebastian Crow, my old boss and new roomie, is asleep on the couch.

  I reach out a hand to touch him, but pull back before my fingers brush his temple. I don’t want to wake him. I want him to sleep like this forever. Peaceful. At ease. In a place where the C-word can’t reach him. Every day he seems to shrink a bit more and his spirit grows bigger to compensate for the reduction of physical space he occupies. He’s ill and there is nothing I can do about it because it’s terminal. My dog, Whisper, and I have moved in to keep him company and make sure he doesn’t fall down the stairs on our watch, but beyond that it is hopeless. There is a great fire that he seems to burn with now. His body has turned against him, but his mind refuses to let go just yet.

  Not until the book is done.

  When he asked me to help organize and fact-check it for him, I couldn’t say no. Not to Sebastian Crow, the career journalist who is writing his memoirs as he nears the end of his life. Writing it as a love letter to his dead mother and an apology to his estranged son. Also as an explanation to the lover he has abandoned. What I have read of it is beautiful, but it means that he is spending his last days living in the past. Because there is no future, not for him.

  Whisper nudges my hand. She is restless. On edge. She feels it, too.

  I put her on a leash, because I don’t trust her mood, and we walk to the park across the street. There’s a man there who has been trying to pet her, so we steer clear of him in a spirit of generosity toward his limbs. On the other side of the park is a pathway that hugs the coastline. Smoke from unseen fires lingers, even here. Not even the sea breeze can dispel it. We walk, both of us feeling uneasy, until we circle back around to the park. I sit on a bench with Whisper pulled close.

  The man who has been watching me walks right past us.

  “Nice night for a bit of light stalking,” I say. “Don’t you think?”

  The man stops. Faces me. He opens his m
outh, perhaps considering a lie, but shuts it again. My back is to the dim streetlight that overlooks this section of the park. Whisper and I are just dark shapes to him, but he is fully illuminated. His coat is open and at his neck there is a long swath of mottled skin running from the hinge of his jaw to his collarbone. It looks like new skin tried to grow there once but gave up halfway, leaving behind an unfinished impression. He’s an older man, but I find his age hard to place. Whatever it is, he has used his years to learn how to dress well. Sleek jacket. Nice shoes. It doesn’t add up. A man, careful with his appearance, who spends his evenings sitting in a park and following women as they walk their dogs.

  We wait in a kind of charged silence, all three of us. Whisper yawns and runs her tongue over her sharp canines to speed things along. He takes this as the threat it’s no doubt meant to be.

  “Your sister told me where to find you,” he says finally.

  If he thinks that’s supposed to put me at ease, he’s off his meds. Lorelei hasn’t spoken to me since last year, since I stole her husband’s car and ran it off the road and into a ravine.

  But I decide to play the game anyway. “What do you want?”

  “Damned if I know,” he says, with a rueful smile. “Taking a trip down memory lane in my winter years, I suppose.”

  “And what’s that got to do with me?”

  “I knew your father once.” It’s a good thing his voice is soft, because said even a decibel louder, that statement could have knocked me on my ass, if I wasn’t already on it. “May I sit down?” He gestures to the bench. There’s something odd about his tone. His enunciation is too measured for someone confronted by an unpredictable animal. I wonder if the scar at his neck has anything to do with his casual demeanor. If he is one of those men who is so accustomed to danger that it doesn’t faze him anymore.