The Dells

by Michael Blair

  “I’m Detective Sergeant Hannah Lewis,” she said, showing Shoe her badge.

  She put her badge away, then took off her dark glasses. She had the sharpest cheekbones Shoe had ever seen, which gave her a slightly fox-like appearance, but it was when he saw her eyes, oblique and a deep violet, that he knew who she was, and when he had last seen her. Her name hadn’t been Lewis then. It had been Mackie.

  “This is Detective Constable Paul Timmons,” she said. Her violet eyes connected with Shoe’s and held them for a moment. “Are you Mr. Schumacher?” she asked.

  “One of them,” Shoe replied. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or disappointed that she didn’t appear to recognize him. “Come in.”

  The detectives followed him into the kitchen. Lewis nodded to Constable Smith. To Shoe and his parents, she said, “Would you mind waiting in here for a minute while I talk to the officers?” Without waiting for an answer, she went into the living room. Constable Smith followed. While Lewis and the uniformed officers conferred in low voices, and Timmons stood silently in the doorway, Shoe pressed the start button on the microwave and heated the milk for his father’s coffee. He heard the front door open and close as Lewis came back into the kitchen.

  Shoe poured his father’s coffee, then held up the pot. Lewis shook her head. Her partner said, “No, thanks.” Shoe filled a mug for himself.

  “What can you tell us about Marvin Cartwright?” Lewis asked, addressing Shoe and his parents.

  “What was that, miss?” Shoe’s father said, turning his head. “You’ll have to speak up.”

  “Sorry,” Lewis said. She repeated the question while Howard Schumacher carefully sipped his coffee.

  “Not much,” Shoe’s father said. “He moved away thirty-five years ago, after his mother died. No idea where to. Lived where the Tans live now. They’ve lived there for fifteen years or so. Before the Tans it was the Gagliardis and before them it was the Bronsteins. He bought the house new, around the same time we did, when the street was a dead end and there were farm fields where the junior high school is now. Joe found an Indian arrowhead. And a musket ball. Remember, Joe? Anyway, you wouldn’t know the place. The woods haven’t changed much, I guess, except they’re a bit wilder now. City’s let the park go to hell, if you ask me, especially along the creek.”

  “How long have you lived here?” Lewis asked.

  “Just a few months shy of fifty years,” Shoe’s father said.

  “That means Marvin Cartwright was your neighbour for fifteen years,” Lewis said. “You must’ve come to know him pretty well in that time.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But he pretty much kept himself to himself, as they say. Not that he wasn’t friendly, mind you. He just didn’t mix much. He was a bit different. The odd man out, you might say. He wasn’t married, for one thing, and he didn’t have a nine-to-five job like everyone else in the neighbourhood. Not sure what he did for a living, actually, but if he worked, it was at home. Or maybe he just looked after his mother full-time. She was an invalid. Bedridden. A truck would deliver oxygen once a month or so, and every so often an ambulance would come, take her away to the hospital, I suppose, and bring her back a few days later. Only time anyone ever saw her was when they were moving her back and forth from the ambulance. Kids called him Marvin the Martian. You know? After the old cartoon character? Some of the older boys used to play practical jokes on him.”

  “What sort of jokes?” Lewis asked.

  “Kid stuff mostly. Leaving flaming paper bags of dog poop on his front porch and ringing the doorbell, hoping he’d stomp out the flames. Letting the air out of his car tires. Wrapping his shrubs in toilet paper. Not Joe, though,” Shoe’s father added, smiling at Shoe. “You used to do yard work for him, didn’t you?”

  Shoe shook his head. “That was Hal,” he said.

  “Did you know him?” Lewis asked.

  “Not really,” Shoe replied. He’d been fifteen the summer Marvin Cartwright had moved away. He remembered a sturdy, sun-browned man, always friendly, but who didn’t smile much. To Shoe, Cartwright had had an aura of mystery about him, but that had likely been a product of his standoffishness and a teenager’s active imagination. Shoe had never spoken to him that he could recall, except to say hello. He hadn’t played jokes on him, as Hal had, until he’d grown out of it, not long before Cartwright had moved away.

  “The littler kids liked him,” Howard Schumacher said.

  Lewis raised her eyebrows.

  “The city used to set up an outdoor skating rink in the park behind the houses across the street. In the summer there was a baseball diamond and playground. The entrance to the park was across from Marvin’s house. In the winter he’d invite kids in for hot chocolate. In the summer he’d make them lemonade. For a while he used to go all out for Halloween, too, decorating his lawn with gravestones and plastic skeletons and such, but the older kids kept tearing it up, so he eventually stopped even giving out treats.”

  Lewis looked up from her notebook at the sound of the back door. A moment later, Shoe’s sister, Rachel, came up the stairs into the kitchen. She was wearing shorts and an athletic top darkened with perspiration. She had a tiny white MP3 player clipped to the waistband of her shorts, the earbuds hanging around her neck on fine, white wires.

  “Hey, Joe,” she said brightly. “I smell coffee — ” She saw Lewis and Timmons. “Oops, sorry. Didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  Shoe introduced Detective Sergeant Lewis and Detective Constable Timmons. Rachel’s expression darkened as Timmons’s eyes moved quickly up and down her body. Her shorts and damp top clung like a second skin.

  “What’s happened?” she said.

  “We’re investigating the death of a man named Marvin Cartwright,” Sergeant Lewis said.

  “Marvin … ” Rachel blinked and for a moment she was far away. She blinked again as she returned to the present. “My god. I haven’t thought of him in years.” Her eyes narrowed. “How did he die? I mean, you wouldn’t be investigating his death if he’d died of natural causes, would you?”

  “Sometime late last night or early this morning he was beaten to death in the wooded area behind your parents’ house.”

  “Beaten to death? By whom?”

  “That’s what we’re investigating,” Lewis said.

  “Yes, of course.” She shivered. “Would you mind if I got dressed? I’m getting chilled. The air conditioning is set too high again,” she added, in a disapproving tone of voice.

  “We just have a couple of questions … ”

  “Which I’ll gladly answer after I’ve changed.” Without waiting for a reply, Rachel turned and strode down the hall toward the bedrooms.

  Lewis looked at Timmons. He shrugged, as if to say, “What can you do?”

  Lewis looked at her notebook, then at Shoe. “Were you one of the kids Cartwright invited into his house?”

  “No,” he replied. “But my sister was.”

  “How old was she?”

  “She was eleven when he moved away.” Shoe said. “I don’t remember how long he’d been having the kids in.”

  “Couldn’t’ve been more’n two or three years, eh, Mother?” Shoe’s father said.

  “She and the other children started visiting Mr. Cartwright around the time Rachel turned six,” Shoe’s mother said. “She was very upset when he left. She adored him.”

  “You said he left after his mother died. What was wrong with her?”

  Vera Schumacher shook her head, dark eyes unfocused. “No one knew. No one ever saw her, except when the ambulance came. Not even the children who visited him. He’d shoo them out whenever she called to him. Then one day an ambulance took her away and never brought her back. A week later a moving van came and packed everything up. The people who bought the house, the Bronsteins, said that except for a broken basement window it was like no one had ever lived there. No one ever saw Mr. Cartwright again.”

  Rachel came into the kitchen, dressed in jeans and a T
-shirt, her dark hair brushed back from her face. Shoe was struck by how much she resembled their mother when she was younger: her compact physique, her broad cheekbones, dark eyes, and slightly square jaw.

  “For the record, Ms. Schumacher,” Lewis said. “Where were you between midnight and 2:00 a.m. last night?”

  “I was here,” Rachel replied.

  “You live here?”

  “Sort of,” she replied. “I have a house in Port Credit, but — ”

  “Thinks we’re gettin’ too old to take care of ourselves,” Shoe’s father grumbled.

  Rachel sighed. “That’s not it at all, Pop. It’s just easier this way.”

  “Humph,” Howard Schumacher said.

  “Why do you think Cartwright came back after all these years?” Lewis asked.

  “I haven’t any idea,” Rachel said.

  “Your mother told the officers that there was a homecoming festival this weekend. Could he have come for that?”

  “I suppose. We ran some ads in local newspapers. We also have a website. Maybe he saw it, but he wasn’t registered.”

  “Have you been in touch with him at all since he left?”

  “No.”

  Lewis studied her notebook, ostensibly reviewing her notes in preparation for her next question. Shoe recognized it as a common interview technique. Many subjects, to fill the silence, will volunteer information, often taking the interview in unexpected directions. It wasn’t a tactic that was likely to work well with his parents, however, especially his mother. She had inherited her Native ancestors’ distrust of unnecessary talk, and had passed the trait on to Rachel and him — he wasn’t sure about their older brother, Hal. To some degree, it had also rubbed off on his father.

  “Besides the boys who played practical jokes on him,” Lewis said after a moment, “was there anyone who particularly disliked him or who had a run-in with him? Maybe someone who didn’t like the little kids visiting him in his house?”

  “Well,” Shoe’s father said slowly, hesitantly.

  “What?” Lewis asked.

  “Howard,” Shoe’s mother said. “Those were simply ugly rumours spread by people with nothing better to do than think the worst of others.”

  “Sorry, Mother,” Shoe’s father said uncomfortably. “It might be important.” Shoe knew what his mother was referring to and didn’t blame his father for being uncomfortable. “Maybe we could go into the other room,” Shoe’s father said to Sergeant Lewis.

  “Howard,” Shoe’s mother said sternly. “I’m not a child to be sent to her room when the grown-ups want to talk.”

  “What is it?” Lewis asked, unable to hide her impatience.

  “Well,” Shoe’s father said again.

  Shoe put his hand on his father’s shoulder, and said to Sergeant Lewis, “That summer, before Cartwright moved away, there were a series of sexual assaults in the woods. One of the victims died. The media dubbed the perpetrator the Black Creek Rapist. As far as I know, the case was never solved.”

  “God,” Rachel said. “I’d forgotten all about that.”

  “Cartwright was a suspect?” Lewis asked.

  “A lot of people in the neighbourhood seemed to think so,” Shoe said.

  “Damn fools, if you ask me,” his father interjected.

  “If for no other reason that he was different,” Shoe continued. “A forty-year-old single man, with no apparent means of support — apparent to his neighbours, anyway — and living with his invalid mother. But the police interviewed most of the men and older boys in the neighbourhood. The thing is, to the best of my recollection, there were no more assaults after Cartwright moved away.”

  “Did you know any of the victims?”

  “I was acquainted with three of them,” Shoe said.

  “How many were there?”

  “Four, that I’m aware of.”

  “What can you tell us?”

  Shoe cast his mind back. “The first victim was a girl I knew from junior high school. Her name was Daphne McKinnon.” Shoe recalled a shy, slightly plump girl, a talented musician who played the violin in the school band. “She was a year behind me, which would make her thirteen or fourteen. One evening in late May or early June she was in the woods when she was attacked from behind, her shirt pulled up over her head, and raped. Her attacker then tied her up with her clothes and left her. She managed to get loose and go to the nearest house to report the attack. She wasn’t able to identify her assailant.”

  Lewis wrote in her notebook, then said, “Go on.”

  “The second attack was two or three weeks later. The victim was a teacher from the junior high school named Hahn. I never knew her first name. She was my ninth-grade English teacher. About twenty-four or twenty-five. Similar MO, except that it happened at midday and in a different part of the conservation area. Her attack was more brutal than the first. She wasn’t able to identify her attacker either.”

  Shoe paused while Lewis scribbled in her notebook. When she nodded for him to continue, he looked at Rachel.

  “What?”

  “The third victim was Marty,” Shoe said gently.

  “Oh, Christ,” Rachel said, the skin around her eyes turning pale. “That’s right. Marty — Martine Elias — was a friend of mine,” she added to Lewis. “But she wasn’t raped, was she, Joe? Just molested.”

  “She got away from her attacker before he could rape her,” Shoe said.

  “Not that it was any less traumatic for her,” Rachel said.

  “How old was she?” Lewis asked.

  “Same age as me. Eleven.”

  Lewis’s face tightened. “She wasn’t able to identify the person who attacked her?” she said.

  “No,” Shoe said.

  “Poor Marty,” Rachel said. “She was my ‘bestest friend,’ as we used to say, until she was attacked. Then we kind of drifted apart. She — ”

  “Excuse me, Ms. Schumacher,” Lewis interrupted. “I’ll ask you more about your friend in a minute. First, though,” she said to Shoe, “tell me abut the last victim, the one you didn’t know.”

  “I don’t remember her name,” he said. “She was a university student who worked part-time for the city parks department. It happened in late July or early August.”

  “Same MO?”

  “As far as I know,” Shoe said. “Except that she was strangled to death, perhaps because she saw her attacker.”

  Shoe didn’t remember much about Marty Elias’s attack or the park worker’s rape and murder. He’d been too upset by Miss Hahn’s attack. She’d been one of his favourite teachers, and because she’d been young and pretty, he’d had a massive schoolboy crush on her. The whole school had been in shock; her attack had occurred just weeks before the end of the school year.

  “Did Marvin Cartwright know any of the victims?” Lewis asked.

  “He knew Marty,” Rachel said.

  “She was one of the kids he invited into his house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does she still live in the neighbourhood?”

  “I don’t know where she lives now,” Rachel said. “Like I said, we fell out of touch after her attack,” she added. “It … changed her. She was always a little precocious, but afterwards she turned slutty. She dropped out of school at sixteen and started hanging out with a pretty rough crowd.” She looked at Shoe. “What was the name of that biker gang she ran with for a while?”

  “The Black Skulls,” Shoe said. “They were mostly weekend warrior types, though. Rough enough, but hardly Hells Angels material.”

  “Are her parents still alive?”

  “I don’t know. They retired to Florida or California, I think.”

  “Did she have any brothers or sisters?”

  “No.”

  “Did Cartwright know any of the other victims?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” Shoe said.

  “No idea,” his father said.

  Rachel said, “I don’t know.”

  “Mrs. Schumacher?” Lew
is said.

  “I don’t know,” Shoe’s mother said.

  Lewis scribbled in her notebook, then asked, “Do the families of any of the other victims still live around here?”

  Shoe’s father said, “The only ones we knew were Marty’s folks.”

  “The McKinnon girl and her family moved away not long after her attack,” Shoe’s mother said.

  Lewis looked at Shoe.

  “I don’t know where Miss Hahn or the park worker lived,” he said.

  “All right,” Lewis said. “We’ll check it out. One last thing. Is there anyone else who still lives in the area who knew Mr. Cartwright?”

  “Let’s see,” Shoe’s father said slowly, rubbing his stubbly chin. “There’s Dougie Hallam and his sister, Janey. Stepsister, actually. I’m pretty sure they knew Mr. Cartwright. Dougie did, anyway. He was one of the boys that played tricks on him. Don’t know for sure if Janey knew him or not.” He looked at Shoe.

  “No better than I did,” Shoe replied, as memories of Janey Hallam bubbled up from the recesses of his mind. Janey had been his first serious girlfriend, the one with whom he had shed his virginity — at a far too tender age, he recalled with a high degree of discomfort — and with whom he’d once believed he’d spend his whole life. He was surprised she still lived in the neighbourhood; the last time he’d seen her, shortly after she’d graduated from high school a year behind him, she’d told him she’d taken a job as flight attendant and was leaving Downsview forever. Did she remember him as well as he remembered her? he wondered. Or as fondly? Perhaps he would look her up, he thought, see how she’d turned out. Or was that a rock better left unturned? He had no desire to resume the acquaintance of her stepbrother, Dougie.

  “And there’s Tim Dutton,” Shoe’s father said.