by Anne Emery
“I was watching a cop show one time,” he said, “and something really bad happened to a kid. A girl. And I remember them saying, ‘You know in cases like this it’s usually the family.’ Somebody in the family that did it. Or somebody else they knew.”
Well, no, that couldn’t be true! I knew nobody in my own family and nobody I had ever met would do something bad to a kid. Maybe it was an American cop show he saw; you never know down there.
John Rory was going on, “They’re always telling us not to get into a car with a stranger. They don’t tell us not to get into a car with our own father or uncle or cousins.”
“They would never say that!”
“So, anyway, I remembered seeing that show, so I told my father about it. And I figured he’d say what he always says, ‘Don’t talk so loose!’ But he didn’t. He said, ‘Yeah, that’s more likely than a lone nut.’”
“Some old weirdo,” I said.
“Right. It’s less likely to be someone like that. Statistically, he said. He never talked to me about stuff like that before. And I thought whoa, we have a huge family, all the MacDonalds, Drummonds, and your MacNeils, and now the Campbells. Imagine if one of them is a perv or a killer or something!”
“Oh my God, do you think there’s somebody like that? Can you think of anybody?”
John Rory shook his head. “But Dad said the Mounties told him that nobody had reported any quare people from away hanging around Kinlochiel all of a sudden.”
I had an idea. “Maybe it’s somebody who hangs around because they are famous, you know, their band. Some guy who started following them around. That happens with famous people. Someone who loves them in a weird way. Or maybe someone jealous of the band.”
“But Dad said nobody’s seen a stranger lurking around.”
“He may not be a stranger. He may be somebody they kind of know, so they never worried when they saw him.”
John Rory shrugged. “We just don’t know what happened that night. Sharon and Andy went home. Bonnie was supposed to have a sleepover with Louise. And now everything’s all blown to hell.”
I didn’t want to think about how Sharon and Andy must have felt about not bringing Bonnie home with them that night and then finding out she was gone, even though it wasn’t their fault. Anybody would let their daughter stay with her cousins; that’s normal. Or that’s what any normal person would think.
“Maybe we can help,” John Rory said then. “We can go around and look for clues. Find out where Bonnie might have gone. See if she dropped anything anywhere. Look out for somebody acting guilty.”
I thought that was a good idea. I hated feeling like a useless tool. “Good plan. And if it is a guy that’s gone loony about them because they’re famous, he won’t be after us, because we’re not in the band. But it’s still a scary idea.” Especially if it’s a member of the family. But I didn’t believe that.
“Yeah, we’ll have to be careful,” John Rory said, “but there’s another thing I remember my father saying. ‘What a cowardly act, picking on a little girl.’ So the guy won’t exactly be a superhero, whether he’s someone we know or a stranger. A lone nut. Dad didn’t say anything about a gang of kidnappers or anything. So if it’s just one guy, and we are being super careful . . .”
“Okay, I’m in,” I said. “But yeah, we have to be really careful. We don’t want the bad guy catching on, and we don’t want our parents finding out and grounding us.”
“And whatever we find out, we’ll have to report it. It’s not as if we’re going to act like a posse in the Old West and bring the guy in ourselves. We’re not stupid.”
After that, John Rory and I left and took a long walk from Nancy’s house to Morag’s place on the Skye Road out in the country. And the sky was a gorgeous blue with a few fluffy clouds floating in it, and they were reflected in the water of Lake Bras d’Or. And on the other side of the road was a farm with a few sheep and cows in the field. It was so cool being out in farmland.
There were a bunch of people I didn’t know in the sitting room at Morag’s, playing cards. They looked up from their game and asked who I was and who were my mum and dad, so I told them and said Morag is my great-grandmother, but they caught on to that once I told them about Mum. John Rory knew most of them, and he joked with them about some of the “local characters.” He meant funny or strange people that lived around there. Then he said, “Get back to your cards now. Don’t let us interrupt you.” So they started to play again, and we sat on the chesterfield and talked a bit between ourselves. Then we heard Morag in the kitchen going on about the Campbells again. John Rory jerked his head towards the kitchen, meaning let’s head in there. So we did. Robbie was at the table with her. There was a bottle of Captain Morgan open on the counter. That’s rum, and they each had a glass in front of them. John Rory and I stood in the corner out of their view and listened.
“But I know this much,” Morag said. “Old Effie Campbell put the buidseachd on Allan Roddy MacDonald.”
“She put a curse on him. And you’re going to tell me a list of calamities befell Allan Roddy and his family as a result.”
“Ach, there was only one. One moonlit night, completely out of the blue, his barn caught fire. The animals panicked, and Allan Roddy went out when he heard the commotion, and he released his cattle, and one of his great big cows trampled him to death. And his family was left penniless.”
“Let me guess,” said Robbie. “Old Effie Campbell torched the place herself.”
“Effie and her family were at a funeral in New Glasgow when it happened. The fire was investigated. No kerosene splashed around, no sign of someone setting the fire. No known cause.”
Even though she was really quiet the way she said it, a shudder ran down my backbone and my arms and out to my fingertips. I couldn’t help it. I could see in my mind’s eye the flames and smoke, and the animals crying and bellowing, and the cow gone crazy with fear and a wild look in her eye, and the poor farmer under her hoofs. And all this happened for no known cause, all because the old lady named Effie put a curse on that man!
I expected Robbie to laugh, because he wouldn’t believe any of it. But he looked mad. He said, “Are you suggesting somebody put a curse on Sharon and Andy?”
“On the whole lot of us! Look at the strife between the members of the band, a family band, and people all at odds with each other —”
“We pay no mind to that. We get along just fine.”
“— and now Bonnie missing.”
Did she mean the Campbells did all this? Did they not want their kids marrying MacDonalds, the way the MacDonalds did not want to marry Campbells?
“Well, you’ll want to be careful making an accusation like that.”
“I make no accusation. I just wonder, that’s all.” She took a drink from her glass and put it down. “Why is nothing being done to find the wee girl?”
“The Mounties have done everything possible, Morag. They’ve been on it from day one. They started an investigation right away, searched for her, questioned all of us, looked into people who had criminal records involving children, sent out a Canada-wide alert, the whole shebang.”
“Well, they didn’t do much of a job, did they? She’s still missing more than two weeks later, and nobody is any the wiser.”
“What else can they do? God knows, if I had any idea, I’d pass it along.”
She said something in Gaelic then, but I didn’t catch it except for the words timcheall an taigh ’ud, which was “around that house.”
I didn’t understand what she said, and I blurted out, “What was that you said, Greatgran Morag?”
She didn’t look surprised that me and John Rory had snuck into the kitchen, and she didn’t give me a dirty look for interrupting. She just said, “I had a bad feeling around that house.”
“I always had a bad feeling just looking at the place. Just
as well it’s an ‘abandoned house’ now, eh? Imagine how it would feel to live in that blight on the landscape!” Robbie was laughing as he said it.
But Morag wasn’t laughing. “Something happened there.”
“What would you be doing on Campbell property, Morag?”
“I took Betty Ferguson’s little dog out for her walks when Betty was away in Halifax for the week. And I passed by the house, and I didn’t like what came over me when I was there.”
I butted in then. “What house is it?”
“That grannda place down the Ogilvie Road.” She meant an ugly place. “Stay well away from it!”
“I will,” I said. I looked away from John Rory who was giving me a great big grin.
“They would have searched it, Morag,” Robbie said. “You can be sure they’ve searched every square inch of this county.”
“And their search has turned up nothing. Which means what? Bonnie, God love her, just vanished into thin air? Went up into the sky, leaving no trace?”
“Well, there may be spooks or goblins at the Campbell house, but I don’t imagine it’s the crime scene the cops are looking for.”
“Mock if yeh must, yeh gomick, but I say they should take another look around that place. Tell them that.”
I knew the right thing to do was to stay away from it. But I couldn’t help myself once I got curious. And John Rory was the same way. We both wanted to find the house Morag was talking about. And I wanted to be back behaving myself before Mum and Dad came to pick me up at Morag’s and found me gone. I knew where the Ogilvie Road was because we had passed the sign for it before, but I had never been on the road itself. Until this very day.
John Rory knew about the bikes in Morag’s barn because some of our cousins had left them there over the years. So we walked in there, trying to look casual. In other words, we snuck in. There were four bikes. They were all old but they worked, and one was the right size for me. It was blue with white fenders and didn’t have any speeds on it, except one. But that was okay; I could pedal fast if I had to. There was a boy’s bike, a bigger one, and it was silver. John Rory took that one. It was getting dark, and my bike had no light, so he would ride ahead.
“Do you know where the Campbells’ ugly house is?” I asked John Rory.
“Don’t know, but we’ll find it. We know what street it’s on.”
We pedaled away down the country road from Morag’s along the lake and a few minutes later we were at the turn for Ogilvie Road. There were lots of trees along the street, and some people had planted gardens with bright pink and purple and red flowers. There were only a few houses, and one was bigger than all the rest. It was brand new with maroon-coloured boards on it, those fake boards made out of plastic, and great big huge windows that were round at the top. But they weren’t the biggest things about that house. There were two humongous garages sticking way out front on each side, squishing the house in between and behind them. That was obviously a new house. The one across the street was a white bungalow with little kids’ drawings in the front window. There were a couple of other friendly places like that, as we made our way down the street, and a nice two-storey one with a really cool motorcycle in the driveway. None of these could be the house Morag was talking about. It was supposed to be an ugly, abandoned place. Now we were nearly at the end of the road.
I was almost ready to give up and say to John Rory that we should turn around when I saw a bend in the road. I biked around it and John Rory followed and passed me, and there it was: an old rickety house that looked about a hundred years old. It was big and square and had a huge porch that wrapped around it from the front to the side. Somebody had painted it black and put white paint on the door and around the windows and on the porch. The black and white might have looked nice if somebody had taken good care of it, but they had let it get all shabby. The black paint was flaking off, and the white looked all dirty. The railing along the porch in some places looked like broken bottom teeth. An abandoned house has nobody living in it anymore. And no wonder. They could make a movie at this place, a movie about a haunted house.
I got kind of nervous about going too close to it. But that’s what we came for. To see why Morag had a bad feeling about it. So we looked at each other, and John Rory said, “Back,” and we got off our bikes and walked them around to the backyard. He tiptoed up the steps and peered in the window of the back door. He put his hand on the doorknob and twisted, and it opened! Whoever left this place left it unlocked. He turned and looked at me and rubbed his hands together the way they do in the cartoons when things go their way.
“Coming?” he said.
And of course we went in. Whoever used to live there had left all their stuff. I don’t mean there was old food on the kitchen counter, or magazines lying around. Everything was really clean and tidy. We sneaked through the kitchen and into the dining room and then the living room, and the furniture was all still there. Dark wood with curlicues and carvings and glass fronts on cabinets, and fancy teacups and silver, and things like that. It sure didn’t look evil. We came to the staircase and stopped. Should we go up? We didn’t even have to talk about it; we just headed up the stairs as quiet as mice. Then I got scared because I started thinking maybe the people didn’t mean to abandon the house. Maybe they died in their beds! And we’d see an old lady or an old man lying in a bed, maybe a skeleton, covered with cobwebs. But when we peeked into the bedrooms, all we saw was more old-fashioned furniture, which I thought was nice. There were bottles of stuff on one of the dressers: perfume and face cream, it looked like. There were no clothes lying around. The bathroom had an old tub with feet, and there was soap that smelled really good. I always liked that smell, and I tried to remember the flower it came from. Lavender, that was it. The bathroom was as tidy as the rest of the house. Do people clean everything up and then abandon a house? And leave behind their face cream? I didn’t know. There was only one place left to look at, and that was the basement. Down, down we went. The stairs were old wooden planks, and the walls were big stones fitted together. There was all kinds of junk down there. We had to be careful because it was turning into night, and it was getting harder to see, and we didn’t want to trip over things. There were racks of clothes, broken chairs and dishes, shelves full of paint cans, a bench with tools on it. There were skates and a toboggan, and a box of toys the kids had in the kinds of old movies they show around Christmas time. I was dying to get into them, but I didn’t think that would be right, even in an old house with nobody living in it. I followed John Rory around from one end to the other, but we didn’t see anything suspicious. Nothing about Bonnie or a bad guy or anything the least bit weird. And I didn’t know what Morag meant about the place because I didn’t get any kind of spooky feeling there at all.
So we left. Went out the back door, closed it quietly, got on our bikes, and rode back to Morag’s barn.
Monty
Maura and I were sitting in Sharon MacDonald and Andy Campbell’s white-shingled Cape Cod house in Kinlochiel. Sharon, first cousin to Maura, was thirty-five years old, tall and slim with shoulder-length dark auburn hair and beautiful hazel eyes, remarkably like those of my daughter, Normie. Sharon’s normal demeanour was gregarious, funny, lively, and warm. Today, as she sat with a cup of tea forgotten in her hands, her face looked grey and drawn.
Ginny, mother of Sharon — mother of the band — was just on her way out when we arrived. Tall and athletic-looking with stylish short white hair, Ginny MacDonald was an icon in the world of Celtic music. She was a singer in her own right, and the mother of the original members of the Clan Donnie band. Ginny was revered in Cape Breton and in Scotland, and in other pockets of Gaelic culture in this country and the United States. Now, with her beloved granddaughter missing, she looked older than her sixty-four years, when, in better times, she had looked much younger. Her story was well known. After completing high school in Cape Breton, she had moved to Toronto on
her own to join the Toronto Light Opera Association. She won considerable acclaim for her performances but then found herself pregnant and she gave birth to a son. The father of the child did a runner, and Ginny raised the child by herself. She did her best to maintain her singing career while caring for her son, but it was a struggle; there was not a lot of help available to a single mother in the 1940s and 50s. Ginny, though, was indomitable, and she carried on until tragedy struck with the death of her little boy at the age of six or seven from pneumonia. She suffered a breakdown and came home to her family in Cape Breton. But she rallied and built a successful career as a singer in her home province. She met Stewart MacDonald, married him, and went on to have the four children who became the Clan Donnie band: Sharon, Kirsty, Robbie, and Ian. Ginny’s granddaughter Bonnie joined when she was just a little girl. Clan Donnie went on to become a smashing success here and abroad. Andy Campbell was a later addition to the group.
Now Ginny was taking her leave of her daughter and of us, and Sharon walked her to the door. Mother and daughter held each other for a long time before Ginny made her departure.
“Mum is distraught over this, too, as you can imagine,” Sharon told us when she came back into the room, wiping tears from her eyes. “And she’s trying to keep it together in front of me because she knows how close I am to completely falling apart. You know about Lyle, her little boy who died in Toronto before she came home and met Dad. Well, she never entirely got over that. Who would? There is nothing in the world worse than the loss of a child.” Her voice faltered, but then she continued, “I have to hang on to my belief that Bonnie is still . . . is still out there somewhere and will be returned to us. I would not be able to go on if I didn’t believe that with all my heart. For Mum, though, this is another circle of hell involving a child in the family. I don’t know if I ever told you this, Maura, but a few years ago I wrote a song for Mum about Lyle, her love for him and her loss. I worked in the fact that she had named him Lyle, which comes from l’isle, so I had a verse about his connection to the island, to here. Anyway, she thanked me and said how much she appreciated it, but she wouldn’t allow me to release it or even sing it to her. That’s how fresh the wound still is.”
