Lament for Bonnie

by Anne Emery

  Danuta was able to smile at that and relaxed a bit. “We didn’t do it very much. We used to whisper. She sat close enough that we could talk sometimes in class. When it wouldn’t interrupt Mrs. Gillis. The only times Bonnie would slip something into my bag at soccer it was usually a joke, a dirty old sock or empty beer bottle she found around the field.”

  Might as well cover some other bases while we were there. “When you heard Bonnie was missing, Danuta, what did you think happened? Where did you think she went?”

  “I didn’t know! I can’t even imagine!”

  “Is there anything you can tell us at all? Was there somebody bothering her? Someone she might have been afraid of?”

  “No! She never said anything like that, and she wasn’t acting any different.”

  “Does she have a boyfriend?”

  “No. She . . .” Danuta shot a glance at her mother. “Bonnie has a crush on Giovanni Gattuso, but they aren’t going out.”

  “Is he in your class, or how did she know Giovanni?”

  “He’s in high school, grade ten. He moved here from Sydney. He’s really good looking, but he’s not full of himself. Bonnie knows she’s too young for him, and she wouldn’t have a chance. She doesn’t flirt with him or anything. She always joked about it. ‘I’ll just worship him from afar!’ So she doesn’t have a boyfriend.”

  “What about guys who like her, even if she isn’t interested in them?”

  “All the guys like Bonnie! She’s gorgeous and she’s musical and she’s a great dancer. And she’s a sweetheart. Not conceited at all.”

  “So, popular with the guys, and girls as well?”

  “Yeah, I mean, some people are jealous of her, some of the girls. But not in a mean way. You just couldn’t be mean about Bonnie! You want to be like her, and you want to hang around with her. I’m so glad to be her friend.” It was then that Danuta lost it. She just crumpled and began crying uncontrollably. She looked up at us, and it would break your heart to see her. “Where is she? Why can’t you guys find her?!”

  We assured Danuta we were doing everything we could to find Bonnie. We thanked her for her help and apologized for upsetting her and left the house.

  Even after all that, Dougald tried to stick to his guns. “I cannot imagine Andy Campbell doing anything improper with a child. I just can’t see it. But,” he said, “that note.”

  “Yeah, that.”

  We drove in silence for a long time. Then Dougald said, “And what about Collie? What was he ‘pissed off’ about? I mean, specifically, beyond the usual situation that his life has gone down the shitter.”

  “Could be anything. Poor bastard. I’ve always felt sorry for him.”

  “Yeah.”

  Dougald and I wanted to surprise Andy Campbell with the schoolroom note, but we didn’t want to add any more pain to Sharon, so we decided to conduct a bit of surveillance to the extent of searching out his car and talking to him away from the house. It didn’t take long. Kinlochiel isn’t Montreal. There was Andy’s Honda at Tim Hortons. We waited for him to come out and waved from our patrol car.

  “Any news?” Andy asked us and came over to my window.

  He didn’t look happy to see us, especially in a public place. But that was understandable even if he was as pure as new-fallen snow. We might have terrible news about his stepdaughter. At the very least, people he knew would be looking at him from the window of the coffee shop. It suited us fine, though, to have him off balance. We told him we just wanted to ask him about something and suggested driving to the school where he teaches math. There would be nobody else around. So he got into his car and headed there, with us following.

  There wasn’t a soul there. He had a key and opened the front door. We all went into a classroom on the ground floor. He sat at the teacher’s desk, and Dougald and I remained standing.

  I pulled the note from my pocket. I had put the two pages in two clear plastic bags.

  “Have a look at this,” I told him and placed the pages on the desk in front of him.

  They say people turn pale. Well, there’s a reason they say that. Andy Campbell’s face went from its usual ruddy colour to a sick-looking white. He jabbed his finger at the notes and said, “That never happened!”

  “We’ve identified that as Bonnie’s handwriting.”

  “This is bullshit. Didn’t happen.”

  “Why would she write something like that about you?”

  By this time he was shaking. I didn’t know if it was from anger or nerves.

  “She wouldn’t.”

  “But she did.”

  “Someone faked her handwriting.”

  “Who?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “It would have to be a really clever forger who knows Bonnie very well, and who hung around the soccer pitch and slipped the note into her friend’s knapsack. Can you think of anybody like that?”

  “This went to a friend outside here on the sports field?!” Andy looked as if, yes, he wanted to kill somebody.

  “Yeah, it did.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense. Something is going on here.”

  “No shit, Andy.”

  “I never spoke to Bonnie or any of the kids this way. Ever. I don’t think this way.” Again, he jabbed the note. “And all this about a dress. It didn’t fucking happen.”

  “It’s her writing, Andy.”

  “Must be some kind of a sick joke, though I can’t picture Bonnie going along with it. She’s not that kind of kid.”

  “What kind of kid is she, Andy?”

  “She is a sweet, smart, innocent young girl of twelve.”

  “I hope you’re right. Don’t go too far away. We’ll be talking to you again.”

  And we left him there. To think things over.

  We had no choice then but to go and see the girl’s mother. This is the worst part of the job for me. More than any of the shit and horror I’ve seen in my twenty years as a member of the force, this is what I hate most. The pain of the families of children who are missing or who have been killed. But we had to see Sharon. She greeted us at the door of the family home.

  “Sharon, no news. I’m sorry.” She seemed to collapse in on herself. Dougald took hold of her left arm to steady her. “But we do have a couple of questions for you.”

  “Yes?”

  “Can you —”

  “Come inside.”

  So we followed her into the house and sat across from her in the living room.

  “Can you tell us if there was an item of clothing Bonnie wanted to buy sometime during the last school term?”

  “More than likely!”

  “Young girls, anh?”

  “Oh, yeah. But why are you asking about clothes?” A look of alarm came into her eyes. “Have you found something?”

  “No, no, I’m sorry, Sharon. Nothing like that. But was there a dress that she wanted and you considered too old for her? Old, as in, say, inappropriate for her young age?”

  “God, no. I don’t remember Bonnie asking for something like that. What are you talking about? She’d be more likely to nag us for a pair of running shoes or a new pair of jeans.”

  “So nothing . . .” I didn’t want to use the word “sexy,” but that was pretty well the real question, so I asked.

  Sharon didn’t like that, and I didn’t blame her. “No! She is still very young in that way, even though she is quite advanced intellectually. She doesn’t have a boyfriend and has not started to look at those types of clothes. Why are you asking me this?”

  At that point, we had to show her the note. She stared at it as if there were rats crawling all over it. She finally asked, “Where did this come from?”

  “Friend of hers on the soccer team found it in her bag.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would she be saying t
hings like that? There was no dress that I considered too old for her. Andy sure as hell would not speak to her like that. He wouldn’t speak to any girl like that. If I thought he would, I’d throw him down a mine shaft and seal it closed with concrete. But he’s not like that. At all. What in the name of God is going on?”

  “That’s her writing, though, Sharon?”

  She nodded her head yes. She looked so miserable I felt like a shit. I felt as if I was dirtying her house just being in it. We let ourselves out.

  Monty

  It was Tuesday, and tonight was the first of the three gigs I had lined up for my band, Functus, at Iggie’s Tavern in Glace Bay. The bus had just rolled into town. Well, not a band bus exactly, but Charlie Trenholm had the next best thing, a 1967 VW van that had the capacity to carry all our members and all our gear, and looked sufficiently downmarket that nobody would mistake us for anything but a blues band. Maura and I had just returned to our lodgings at her parents’ place in Glace Bay after taking our kids Normie and little Dominic on an excursion to the beach outside town. Dominic had an uproarious time splashing around in the sea and throwing sand at us and collecting shells, and he was wailing the blues when it came time to leave. He perked up, though, as did his sister and mother, when we topped things off with a visit to Doctor Jerry Goldberg’s chocolate shop in Sydney. We duly ingested the medications as prescribed by the worthy doctor and began feeling the benefits immediately. Ten minutes after arriving back at the house, I got a call from Charlie that he and the others had just signed in at the Bayview Hotel and were heading to the hotel bar to start things off. I said I’d be joining them shortly and would be bringing my confessor along for what promised to be a long night of blues and booze, two of the good priest’s favourite activities. Brennan had become a regular at our gigs, and Charlie was glad to hear he’d be in the mix.

  But before I could pick up the phone to advise Brennan to get dressed down for the evening, the phone rang and Maura’s mother, Catherine, answered. “Monty, it’s for you.”

  “For me?” Probably Charlie again. I hoped it wasn’t my office in Halifax, telling me a client was in trouble and needed me “forthwith.”

  I got up and took the receiver from Catherine. “Hello?”

  “Monty Collins?” The man’s voice sounded old, a bit shaky.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t know me, but I would appreciate the opportunity to speak with you, if I could.”

  “Speak to me about . . . ?”

  “If you could come here, I’d explain it all. I don’t want to get into it on the telephone.”

  Paranoid that law enforcement had his phone tapped, or just worried about being overheard by somebody nearby. Well, I’d go and check it out. No harm in that. Maybe.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Glace Bay. Could you meet me at the Legion?”

  “Yes, I could. What time?”

  “Half an hour?”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll have a Red Sox cap on, in case you have to pick me out from a crowd.”

  “What was that all about?” my wife and mother-in-law asked in unison.

  “I honestly don’t know. Somebody in trouble, by the sound of things. Maybe this is a start on a new client base in Cape Breton. Anyway, I’m going out to meet the guy and see what he wants.”

  “Be careful,” Catherine warned me. “There are a lot of weirdoes around these days, as we know all too well.”

  Half an hour later, I was in front of the Royal Canadian Legion on Union Street, and an old fellow approached me, with a cane in his left hand and a cigarette in his right. His face was mostly obscured by the ball cap pulled low over his forehead. He stopped and shifted the cigarette to his cane hand so he could shake hands with me. He introduced himself as Angus R. Chisholm, “one of the Angus Hectors.” He said, “We don’t have to go inside. We can just talk out here. I won’t take up much of your time. I live on a farm outside Kinlochiel, but I’m in town to see my sister. I just got out of the VG.” The Victoria General Hospital in Halifax. “I went into a coma, and they took me to Sydney by ambulance, and then they decided to transfer me to Halifax. I wasn’t in the hospital the whole time I was in Halifax. I stayed with my daughter after they let me out, but I had to keep checking in with the doc at the VG till they said I was fit to go home. It’s all to do with my kidneys. You don’t want to know.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re on the mend,” I said. I wasn’t going to rush him. A story unfolds better if the teller is not thrown off his stride.

  “So with all of that, I was out of things for a while. Didn’t know about this terrible business with Bonnie Clan Donnie. That happened just around the time I had my spell, and then nobody filled me in for a long time afterwards. My daughter didn’t want to give me bad news while I was recovering. And a young girl missing from her home in Cape Breton is just about as bad as news can get.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Now I think Collie MacDonald is a fine young man. But . . .” I waited. “I don’t know what night this was because I got sick, and it’s all a blur. I didn’t go to the Mounties with this.”

  Just as I feared, this was going to be bad. Bad for Collie.

  “Because I like and respect Collie. And I know you’re a lawyer.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You married one of the MacNeils.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  He peered at me as if trying to determine whether I could be trusted with the information he wanted to impart. I could see him making his decision.

  “I’m pretty sure it was Collie.”

  “Oh yes? Sure it was Collie where?”

  “On that piece of land where Master Campbell wants to build her new Nob Hill. Used to be MacKenzie land. Collie’s got that digger out there. Anyway, I was walking past there that night, whatever night it was, and I’m almost one hundred percent sure I saw Collie out in the field. With Bonnie.”

  Oh, God, here it is. But I had to know. “What time of night would it have been, Angus?”

  “It was nearly midnight.”

  “Dark then. How well could you see them?”

  “The moon was out. I don’t think it was full or anything, but there was enough light to see where I was going. I could see well enough to be sure right away that it was them.”

  “How far away were they? How far from you?”

  “Eighty feet, hundred maybe. You know how you recognize a person’s walk without realizing you know it? He walked like Collie. Same size as him, same hair. And I thought that was Bonnie’s voice. It was definitely a young girl’s voice. I’ve been to their concerts, heard them on the radio, heard her speak. My first thought — and I had no reason to be thinking about them at all — was That’s Collie MacDonald and Bonnie.”

  “Did you wonder what they’d be doing out there in the dark?”

  “Well, I knew he was working on that land. Maybe he wanted to show it to her. But, well, at night? I don’t know. I just know I saw them. I was about to call out to them when Glenn MacPhee came by along the road in his pickup, and he saw me and offered me a lift home. So I got into the truck.”

  “Did you mention to MacPhee that you thought Collie and Bonnie were out there?”

  Angus R. shook his head. “Glenn started going on about one of the politicians who was in trouble in the news. Glenn’s a dirty, dirty Liberal, and it was a black Tory in the news, so that’s what we talked about. But just before he pulled out to start driving again, I had looked out to the field and I saw . . .” He hesitated, and I steeled myself. “I saw them hugging each other and then I turned back to answer something Glenn had asked me. And when I looked around again, Collie was standing looking down, and I thought she was on the ground. It looked like her knee sticking up, you know, lying down with her leg bent.”

  Oh, Christ. “Did you
think about telling Glenn to stop the truck and see if she was all right?”

  “No! That field is full of rocks. I don’t remember what was going through my mind but I probably assumed she stepped backwards and fell. He would have helped her up. Then I was gone in the truck. When I got back from Halifax and heard all the news, I invented a story to ask Glenn whether he remembered what night it was that he came by and picked me up. But he has no idea. It didn’t stand out in his mind.”

  Angus R. didn’t know what night that was, but I would lay odds on it being the fifteenth of July.

  “What were you doing walking out that way so late yourself, Angus?”

  His eyes shifted to the Legion building and then back to my face. “I was over at Art MacGillivray’s.”

  “Oh, who’s that?”

  “Makes his own.”

  “Shine?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you had some moonshine on board when you were walking past the land at midnight.”

  “Yeah, I did. But I know what I saw. I’ll tell you this, though: I can’t see Collie MacDonald hurting his little girl, or any other kid, for that matter. The divorce from Sharon knocked him on his arse for sure, but that’s understandable. So he takes a drink. He always did. All the more after a bunch of his friends were killed in the twenty-sixth colliery.”

  “The explosion.”

  “Yeah. So, sure, he drinks. Don’t we all? He’s not a killer and he’s not a perv. I have to report what I saw, in good conscience, though I have to tell you my conscience doesn’t feel very good right now. I feel I’m slandering a man who never hurt a soul in his life.”

  “You’ve done the right thing, Angus. What I’m going to do is invent a reason to see Collie and bring the conversation around to this sighting. I won’t mention your name.”

  “See what he says. Probably a perfectly innocent explanation.”

  “See what he says.” And what he doesn’t say. And how he reacts. Body language, while silent, can speak volumes.

  I bid Angus R. good day, drove back to the MacNeils’ place, and put on my old “Dutchie Mason, Prime Minister of the Blues” T-shirt. Maura was going to spend the evening with her folks, happy to have Catherine and Alec to herself, but she offered to drive me to the gig. Insisted, as a matter of fact, and she got no resistance from me. Alcohol would be a factor in the night ahead, and I would not be fit to have the care and control of a motor vehicle. Brennan Burke had made arrangements to stay with a priest of his acquaintance at Holy Cross church, so we stopped there to pick him up. He, too, was attired in jeans and a T-shirt, but whatever his said had long faded from view.