by Anne Emery
“Thank goodness he left!”
I turned to see a woman who appeared to be dressed for the office, the top corner office with a view and too much furniture. The woman’s short ash-blond hair was swept back from her face, and her light skin was overwhelmed by her bright red lipstick. She wore a suit of the same colour red, with wide, severe-looking shoulders.
“Thank goodness who left, Mum?” Nancy said to her. So this was Nancy’s mother, Andy Campbell’s former wife.
“Ronnie Wilson. He was boring me absolutely to death about a home he wants to list with me. Do I think he should get it rewired? Should he have landscaping done? Do I think the space above the garage would work as an in-law suite? I’ve seen it. I wouldn’t put my dog-in-law in there. How much do I think it will go for? Frankly, I think it won’t go at all. It would be nothing but a starter home for a couple barely able to qualify for a mortgage. I told him I’d pass him along to a more junior realtor. I don’t have time for that sort of listing anymore. Oh, I’m sorry. Hello, Maura. Long time no see. And this must be your husband. Hi. We haven’t met. I’m Marsha Campbell.”
“Monty Collins,” I said, getting to my feet.
She took my hand in a bone-crushing grip. When did people start thinking they had to put on such a macho display when shaking hands?
“And this is?” She looked admiringly at Brennan, who had risen to greet her. Tall, with black eyes, and black hair silvering at the sides, the priest often received admiring glances.
“Brennan Burke,” he replied, and he, too, was treated to the board-room warrior handshake. Except that he didn’t let it pass. “Ah, now, there’s no need of that.”
She gave him an uncertain smile. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
He rubbed his right hand with his left and affected a look of great pain.
“Looks like a case of crushed metacarpals,” Lee Kaulbeck said.
“Those will be next,” said Brennan, pretending to misunderstand.
“May I join you?” Mrs. Campbell asked.
“Sure,” said Maura, and the woman known as “Master” Campbell joined the party.
“Don’t talk business to them, Mum! We’re at a wedding!” said Nancy.
“Kids!” her mother said in reply. “She doesn’t realize yet that half the business that is conducted is conducted during social occasions. I’m sure you’d agree, Monty. You’re a lawyer, I understand? Don’t tell me you haven’t attracted much of your client base on the golf course or at the club!”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to tell you exactly that, Marsha. I’m a criminal lawyer. If my clients are spotted on the golf course or in the club, the pro is going to call the police on them, and I’m called in to defend them on the theft charges or assault charges or murder charges arising out of whatever mayhem they caused in the clubhouse.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Somebody has to do it,” I told her, as if my career had been foisted on me by a cruel societal lottery.
“I suppose you’re right. You live in Halifax, I believe.” We agreed that she had it right. “What kind of home do you have, if you don’t mind my asking? I’m not talking business, but I find that everybody likes to talk about their home.”
Maybe in her circle they do.
“Old place on Dresden Row,” Maura said.
“Is that downtown?”
“Yes.”
“Not a lot of room to expand in some of those old city-centre streets, I suppose.”
“No need to expand. It’s all the space we need.”
“I’m sure you’re right.” She didn’t sound sure at all. “And you, Brennan? What kind of property do you have?”
“I have no property,” he said.
“What do you mean?” She looked startled. He must have had a prosperous look about him, which belied his property-less station in life.
“There’s a place they let me stay in.”
She gave him a wary look. “Who lets you stay in their place?”
“Some kindly priests in the inner city of Halifax.”
That gave her pause. He didn’t look it, but this Burke must be some kind of charity case. Be that as it may, Master Campbell was not one to give up without a pitch. “Do you work, Brennan?”
“I toil in the vineyard of the Lord.”
“Yes, yes, I guess we all do. Or we should. You know, if you have savings, or an income of any kind — something we can take to the bank — I can help you get onto the property ladder. It’s never too late, Brennan!”
“Onto the what?”
“You start small, with a little starter home, and then you work your way up the ladder to something more, well . . . even looking at you, Brennan, I see you in an executive home.”
Not an astute judge of character, Master Campbell.
But she was on surer ground when Doctors MacLean and Goldberg retired from the dance floor and returned to the table. Master’s eyes lit up at their arrival. “Do we have room for everybody?” she asked.
“Lee and I are going to have a dance,” said Nancy, getting up so the older couple could have their seats.
But Lee looked reluctant to leave. “Grace,” he said, but he never got beyond that.
“Lee, they’re playing ‘In the Mood.’ How can you resist? I didn’t put on my dancing shoes for nothing. Come on!” I got the impression that her boyfriend would have preferred to stay at the table and advance his medical career, but Nancy took him firmly by the hand and led him to join in the dance.
Master greeted the doctors. “Hello, Grace, Jerry. Beautiful wedding!”
“Lovely,” Grace agreed.
They chatted for a bit about the bride’s and groom’s apparel and the children in the wedding party, and then Master got down to brass tacks. “Grace. Jerry. I have an exciting proposal to make to potential investors. A real estate development that will be the industry leader in this region of the island. I call it Bretonwood Vistas. I’m going to build high-end homes with cathedral ceilings and granite countertops, and I’ll say no more about it now. I never talk business at a social gathering. But here is my card. If you’re interested, I’ll send you a prospectus, photos of my model setup, the whole ball of wax.”
Grace lived up to her name and took the card. Her husband moved his head in rhythm with the music and pretended he hadn’t heard a word.
But Master was on a roll. “Collie MacDonald is partnering with me on the project.”
Partnering? Are we verbing nouns here? All I said was, “Collie?”
“Yes, he’s a true believer in Bretonwood Vistas.”
Not the Collie MacDonald I knew. He was content to sit in his non-executive house in sight of the rusted-out heavy water plant and drink his nights away. He wouldn’t be caught dead in an “executive home” with “cathedral ceilings” and over-sized garages, any more than Brennan Burke would, and he sure as hell would not have the interest or the cash to invest in such a scheme.
Master must have caught a look of skepticism on my face, because she said, “There are different ways to invest of course. Labour has value just as money does.”
“The labour theory of value, is it? You’re a Marxist, are you, Mas— Marsha?”
“Good heavens!” You’d think I’d accused her of being a serial killer.
I figured good old Collie had been sucked into providing cheap, or maybe free, labour in return for profits that would never materialize during the lifetime of anyone in this room. “Is he working on the project now?”
“Oh, yes. He’s excavating the old MacKenzie land, which I have acquired. And when I have my investors on board, I’m going to purchase the adjoining parcels.”
She went on like that, and I felt my eyelids getting heavy, until she said something that snapped me back to the table. “Collie is very enthusiastic about the project. Out
on that land a little too often, in my opinion. I don’t know what he was doing there, looking for, whatever. But it was all worth it, because he put the run to Andy! Nearly ran him down with the excavator.”
Maura said to her, “That’s a lovely thought, Marsha.”
“Maura, he deserves it, after the way he treated me.”
“Well, I know it could not have been easy for you, splitting up, but to have him pounded into the earth by a piece of heavy equipment may be a little harsh. I never even considered that for Monty.”
“Glad to hear it, my darling,” I said.
“Ha ha,” Master said. “But Andy was such a shit. First he tried to run out on me when I got pregnant with Nancy. Do you know what he said when I announced my pregnancy? ‘I hardly know you.’ Well, he knew me well enough to knock me up. And he said, ‘Let’s wait a bit.’ Wait, with a baby on the way! What was I going to do, walk down the aisle in a big white dress with a huge belly on me? Wait till my daughter was old enough to be my maid of honour? I don’t think so. I insisted that he do the right thing and marry me the way any gentleman would do. Then, after we settled down together and had two more children, he up and ran off with Sharon MacDonald, leaving me high and dry and in debt! Collie feels the same way about him, as you can imagine, with Sharon and Andy running off together. I only wish I’d been in that digger with Collie when he spotted Andy there. To see the look on his face!”
She noticed the look on our faces and quickly said, “Jeely Cripes, I don’t mean we would have killed him. I just mean it would have been fun to see him have to jump out of the way of the shovel.”
“When was this? What was Andy doing there?” I asked.
“When? It was sometime after Bonnie disappeared. Why? You’d have to ask him that. I have no interest in where he goes or why he goes there.”
Pierre
Dougald and I were catching up on paperwork at the detachment when a call came in from the mother of a young girl called Danuta Bukowski in Kinlochiel. Her mother reported that Danuta had something to tell us about Bonnie MacDonald.
Danuta was a bundle of nerves when we got there. Her mother invited us in, and we sat down in the living room. Danuta was twelve but small for her age, dressed in an Anne of Green Gables T-shirt. Her light brown hair was up in a ponytail; she kept fidgeting with the elastic until her mother reached over and took her hand, patted it, and held it. There was a crumpled piece of paper on the coffee table.
“Hello, Danuta,” I said to her. “You maybe have some information for us?”
She looked at the paper and then at her mum.
“Tell them, Danuta. Take your time.”
“We’re going camping at Ingonish Beach next week.” She spoke in a halting little voice. We didn’t rush her. “And so I was getting my knapsack ready. Emptying out my soccer stuff so I could put other stuff in.”
“Right, okay.”
“And I found that.” She pointed to the paper as if it was on fire.
Her mum interjected, “She’s on the same soccer team as Bonnie, in the same class at school. They’re good friends.”
I just nodded and waited for the child to continue.
“Yeah, that’s right. But I didn’t know she wrote me any note!”
“This is a note from Bonnie to you?” I asked.
“Yeah. Yes, it is. But I didn’t know till now! I never saw it before. I only read it today. Or . . .” She looked at her mother again. “I mean, last night.”
“But we knew we would call you first thing in the morning,” said the mum.
Danuta went on, “Bonnie must have written it and shoved it in my knapsack at one of our games. We always left our bags lying around. And I just didn’t see it!”
The poor little thing looked as if she was the guy on trial for the abduction. I tried to reassure her. “That’s all right. Nobody can blame you for not reading a note when you didn’t even know it was there. We really appreciate you and your mum calling us, Danuta. Now, I’m going to put on a pair of gloves here. Maybe I can help with the dishes while I have them on!”
She gave a little laugh to my feeble joke, and I took out a pair of latex gloves and pulled them on.
“Who all would have touched the note, Danuta? Can you tell me that?”
She bit down on her lower lip, and her mother answered, “I read it after Danuta told me about it. And I filled my husband in, but he didn’t pick it up. So, in this house, it was me and Danuta.”
“Very good, okay.”
There were two pages stapled together. I picked the note up by its top edges and read:
He’s not just my stepdad. He said we are “really close friends,” and now that I’m twelve we can do lots of new things together, just the two of us without the other kids or Mum. Maybe me and him can tour together, him playing and me step dancing. I asked him again about the dress. And he said Mum didn’t want me to have it, that it was “too old” for me but Mum was old-fashioned like that. He would get it for me and it would be our little secret, and I could wear it for him when all the rest of them were out of the house. Or if we went on tour together. He asked me if I had tried it on at the store, and I said yes. And he said he had seen it in the store window, and he thought it might be too low cut on top! He asked me if it was, and I said no, and I must have turned red because he laughed and said, “Come here” and gave me a big long hug.
The second page read:
Dad is pissed off again but Andy says he’ll take care of it. Same old shxx! See you later, Danu — lots of laughs to come!
Plenty of land mines in that. I had to go easy. After placing the note in an evidence bag, I smiled at Danuta and asked, “So, this is Bonnie’s handwriting?” The letters were faint on the page, as if the writer had pressed lightly with the pen, and they were slanted to the right. The tops of some of the letters were rounded, others pointy.
Danuta looked closely at the pages and nodded her head.
“You’d be used to her writing.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you remember a dress she wanted to buy?”
“No!”
I was surprised at how forceful that came out. “Was this the whole note? Maybe there was another page and the dress was discussed there?”
“I don’t know. This was all there was in my bag.”
I had to get back to the dress again. “You sounded very sure there about the dress, that you didn’t remember her wanting one.”
“It’s gross! All that about it being low on the top.” The girl’s face turned red and she looked away from all of us. Dougald and I waited for more. “That didn’t sound like something Bonnie would say.”
“But it’s in her writing.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t sound like her. She doesn’t —” Danuta looked up at us and I could read the fear in her eyes “— didn’t? She never talks like that, about low cut dresses or stuff like that. And it’s really gross that her stepdad talked like that! Ew.”
You got that right, I wanted to say to her. Mrs. Bukowski was fuming by her daughter’s side.
“So,” I began, “that didn’t sound like the Bonnie you knew, the way she usually was.”
“No!”
Classic grooming behaviour, in my experience. An abuser lulls the victim and tries to form a bond with harmless behaviour at first, moving from appropriate to inappropriate behaviour in stages, meant to lower her inhibitions against sexual activity and getting her ready for things to come. But I was jumping to conclusions. I got back on track.
“Had you noticed any changes in Bonnie lately?” I had to be careful not to sound gross myself. “I don’t mean her getting taller or anything like that, but changes in her attitudes, the things she would say, things she was interested in?”
“She seemed the same to me. Same old Bonnie. A normal person!”
“Did Bonnie talk much about her
stepfather?”
“Sure. But it was nothing weird, not like that!” She pointed an accusing finger at the table where the note had been.
“Did she ever say anything about going out on tour with him, just the two of them?”
She shook her head no.
“Do you know him at all, Andy Campbell?”
“Everybody knows him. Everybody takes music lessons from him. Him or Mrs. Beaton. Sometimes they teach together. He’s fun. He’s a really nice guy. Except what he said in there.” The note.
“Bonnie says in here that her dad was ‘pissed off.’ Do you know anything about that?”
“Unh unh.” No.
“Do you know her father, Collie MacDonald?”
“Sure. He used to bring her over to play with me. He used to be around all the time. He’s her dad. Her real father, before him and Sharon got divorced. And he is still around sometimes, still sees Bonnie and the other kids.”
“How did Bonnie get along with him?”
“Great, no problem. Except she used to get upset thinking about him being alone. And she would feel guilty having so much fun with Andy, and taking music lessons from him, and living with him, when her dad was left out of it all. I told her it wasn’t her fault, and she shouldn’t feel guilty. And she knew that, but still she felt sorry for Collie. She said that’s why he . . .”
“Why he what? Don’t feel bad about telling us.”
“Why he gets drunk so much.” It pained her to say it; this wasn’t a girl who enjoyed other people’s troubles. “He drinks because he got dumped by Sharon. And Andy gets to see his kids, Collie’s kids, more than Collie does.”
I tried to bring the conversation back to something less distressing. “Did you and Bonnie often exchange notes?”
She gave me a wary kind of look before she said, “Sometimes in school.”
I had to laugh. “Worry pas, Danuta. We don’t arrest people for slipping notes across the aisle in school! And we won’t tell the teacher.”
