by Anne Emery
“She refused to buy the parcel of land the fellow wanted to sell her in the first place. Good land up on a hill with a view. Marsha kept haggling and trying to beat him down about the price. So he sold her the other piece of land instead. By that time, he probably figured it served her right, getting the crappier parcel. And look at it this way: she has her own mine now! If she doesn’t mind getting her shoes and gloves dirty, she can start bootlegging coal.”
“Maybe she’ll install coal furnaces in the new houses she’s building outside Kinlochiel here.”
“You can count on it. Anyway, if you heard I was out there, at the new development site, you heard it from Marsha herself. Or maybe from Collie. Yeah, I was out there. Because somebody told me they had second-hand information that Bonnie had been out there with Collie. I didn’t know any more than that. Didn’t know what day or night they were there. But if she had been out there with him, on a headland that drops thirty feet down to the ocean, I wanted to see it for myself.”
“You didn’t think Collie would have . . .” I found that I couldn’t say the words aloud.
“Think Collie would throw his daughter off a cliff? No.”
“What did you — what do you — think he might have done with her? To her?”
He turned his head and blew out some smoke, and then turned back to me. “I don’t think he would do anything to hurt her. Nothing violent, nothing screwy. Not deliberately. But if something happened, such as a quarrel between them over one thing or another, and he ended up hitting her — and again, I can’t imagine him hitting her — she might have been injured more seriously than one might expect. What if they argued, he ended up lashing out, and she was hit hard or fell and, well, died as a result? Try explaining that to the child’s mother. And to the police. His first instinct might have been to cover it up. Get rid of . . . the evidence. And on Marsha’s land, you’ve got a sheer cliff face and an unforgiving rocky beach and tide below.”
“So you went out there to look.”
“Yeah, for all the good it would do. If she went into the water there, she’d be long gone in the tide. But, just to be clear here, Monty, I was not convinced that anything like that had happened. I was going crazy when she disappeared, and I got it into my head that I should go out there and look around.”
“And Collie was on the land when you went out.”
“Yeah, as it turns out. There is a stand of trees, which Marsha will no doubt bulldoze out of existence. They blocked my view of the excavator. But when I walked past the trees, there was Collie up in the cab of the machine. There was a pile of earth in the shovel. He came towards me and lifted the shovel and then dumped the earth out. I figured he was trying to tell me he wanted to bury me. But I don’t hold that against him. How can I? His wife and I ended up together, and his daughter had gone missing. I wasn’t going to get in his face about a bit of dirt. I turned away and walked along the cliff and of course didn’t see anything, and I fucked off after that.”
“Did you go to the site alone?”
“No, I got a buddy of mine to go out with me. Arnie MacIntosh. You can check with him.”
There was no need. Andy would not have given me MacIntosh’s name if he did not know he would confirm the story. Which was good for Andy. And maybe that was the point, had been the point of the whole exercise in the first place: bring a witness and go out there in search of his stepdaughter, like an innocent man who had no idea where she had gone.
Chapter IV
Normie
I had some unfinished work to do. I had gone to the wrong house, the old one instead of the new one with the big double garage, which was the one that spooked Morag. The Mounties had gone to that one, the new one, and found the dead kitty buried out in the yard. But Morag had a bad feeling going by that house, and it must have been about something more than the poor old kitty who was just a skeleton now. I asked Morag if she had John Rory MacDonald’s phone number in Ben Eoin, and she did. She had his family’s number in a little old leather notebook, so I called him. John Rory was coming to Kinlochiel for his fiddle lesson with Mrs. Beaton anyway, so we made a plan. I had my own lesson an hour before his, so I went to Mrs. Beaton’s and did okay with my music, and she was really nice and said I was progressing very well. She is older than Mum but not as old as my grandmother, and she has a bunch of grownup kids who live in Halifax and Ontario, and she used to play the fiddle in a band that was all ladies. Her name is Maggie, and there is a magazine with her picture on the cover with some other stars from a TV program called Singalong Jubilee. She has a record album signed by John Allan Cameron, and she said, “I claim him as a distant relation.”
I said, “How come you can do that?”
“I’m a Cameron. My husband is a Beaton.” So that made sense; she wasn’t just making it up about John Allan being related. I saw that “Sound the Pibroch” was one of the songs on the record.
She has a painting on her wall that says “Achnacarry” and I asked her about it, and she said it was her clan chief’s home in Scotland, the home of Cameron of Lochiel. “Our homestead. The new one.” She kind of clamped her lips together after she said it, as if there was something wrong. The house didn’t look new to me. It was a great big old-fashioned stone place almost like a castle. Very cool. I said it looked beautiful, but I didn’t say it looked old. Anyway, Maggie told me I could wait in her house while John Rory had his lesson. He came and played and was way better than me. But I didn’t feel too bad because he is four years older and started learning years ago, and I was just a beginner. I was really happy that John Rory wanted to hang out with me even though I’m younger than he is. My cousins here never make a big deal out of people being older or younger than them, the way the kids do back home. Here, they’ll hang out with you anyway.
After we said goodbye and thanks to Mrs. Beaton, we went to Great-grandma Morag’s and got the bikes out again and rode off to the right house this time. We walked around it, and everything was normal. We went to where the Mounties had dug up the cat. You could see where it was because there was earth instead of grass. We peeked in the windows of both garages; there was nothing in either of them.
“Room for two tour buses in each of those things,” John Rory said.
Then we wanted to get inside the house, so we kind of crept around the outside.
“Look at that,” John Rory said. One of the windows at the back was not quite even with the outside wall. “Cheapo construction. I’ll bet there’s a puddle of water in there every time it rains.”
“I bet there is. In my dad’s work, they have people suing each other all the time because of leaky windows. It sounds as if people who build things now don’t bother to do it right. He says there are places built thousands of years ago in Europe that still don’t leak.”
“Yeah, a lot of the builders now use crap materials and are too mean to pay good workmen to do a good job. This was probably one of the houses built by Sandy the Scotsman.”
“Isn’t almost everybody a Scotsman around here?”
“Most, yeah. But they call him that because he’s as tight as the bark on the trees.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s tight with his money. Hates to spend it. If he built this place on the cheap, it may be good news for us. Let’s see if we can pry this window loose.”
John Rory’s bike had a little bag attached to the back of the seat. It was for tools or something. He opened it up, and it had an old apple core in it, some candy wrappers, and a bicycle wrench. So he took the wrench and stuck it in the side of the window frame and pried the window loose. It was easy. We both pulled on the window until it came out. And then I thought, Oh my God, we might get arrested for breaking into a house! And the first thing I thought after that was that we were not the first people to do it. The idea came into my head that somebody else had broken in here, and that was the real reason why the window was partly sticking out. But even i
f somebody else had done the first break-in, that wouldn’t mean we wouldn’t get into trouble if we got caught. What if the Mounties drove by? Then my dad would have to defend us in court. Then I remembered it would be okay for me because I was under twelve. They couldn’t put me in jail. But could they put me in reform school? I had read stories about places like that, especially in the old days.
“John Rory,” I said, “we have to be careful not to touch anything.”
“Fingerprints, right.”
“We could get in big trouble, especially you because you’re over twelve.”
“Okay, the bikes are here behind the house. They can’t be seen from the road. And we’ll wipe off everything we touch. And we’ll make it quick and get the hell away from here.”
So we removed the window and busted into the house and then wiped our prints off the window and the frame. That window took us into the kitchen. There was nothing in there. No table or chairs or dishes. From there we headed down the stairs to the basement. It was pretty dingy, but there was enough light coming from the basement windows for us to see. Again, there was nothing, not even a furnace. Just a concrete floor with a lot of dust balls. Cripes! What was that? Something scurried across the floor, and I heard myself make a little yelp. I clapped my hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t make any more noise. John Rory laughed. He didn’t care if anybody heard, because there was nobody there.
“What was that?”
“Maybe a mouse. If we’re lucky.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing, little cuz, nothing.”
“What else do you think it might have been?” I jumped, without even meaning to.
John Rory leaned towards me and whispered, “This place may be run by the rats now! They are very intelligent animals. Evil geniuses. Some say they will take over the world after we’re all dead.”
“No! Let’s get out of here!”
“Can’t. We haven’t explored the possibilities of this underground chamber yet.”
“Okay,” I said, but I didn’t want to.
“Follow me. If there is anything in here, I’ll kill it.”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Come on.”
So he started walking along the edges of the basement, near the walls, looking to see if there was anything suspicious. I didn’t want to say it, and maybe he was thinking the same thing: what if somebody was buried under the floor here? Would an abandoned house be a good place to hide a body? But the Mounties had already been here. I didn’t know what to think. Anyway, we crept all around the basement and there was nothing to see. There were a couple of small holes that seemed to go under the walls. I didn’t want to think about what might go in and out of there. Same with some round openings in the walls. I thought maybe there was supposed to be a washer and dryer there. I didn’t spend any time looking into the holes.
Then John Rory made a gasping sound, drawing in his breath. I stopped in my tracks and looked. He was staring up at the basement ceiling. There were wood beams with white cottony things hanging down from some of them. God! Something was on my face. My hand flew up and I hit myself in the mouth to get it off. I couldn’t stop shaking my hand after that; there was something sticky on it.
“Spiders, that’s all,” said John Rory. “There’s nothing of interest here. Let’s head upstairs.”
Good. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. We went upstairs again and saw a bathroom with a toilet that was all rusty coloured inside, and no sink or shower. We went into the dining room next, or at least it was probably the dining room. Nothing in there either, except some really awful maroon and dark green flowery wallpaper with strips of different wallpaper running across the top of it. I thought it had too many designs all in one place. The living room was empty, too.
John Rory said, “All right. Up the stairs.”
We went upstairs and saw a huge bathroom with bright, shiny fake-gold taps, and there was pink and purple flowery carpet all through the bathroom. How could you keep that clean in a bathroom? Yecch. There were four big bedrooms with flowery wallpaper and great big closets and mirrors covering all the sliding closet doors. But no furniture. I was getting really anxious to be out of the house. We were wasting our time on a nice day, and what if we got caught and it was all for nothing?
We ran down the stairs and headed through the kitchen to the back window. I felt something under my feet and looked down and saw a bunch of stories cut out from really old newspapers. I hadn’t seen them on the way in. We must have knocked them off something on our way through the first time. I bent over to look at them, and a couple of them lifted off the ground and floated a few inches away. I realized the breeze coming through the open window was moving them and must have blown them onto the floor after we came in. John Rory picked them up and put them on the kitchen table. They were stories from back in the 1940s. One of the Campbells’ old grandparents must have been here, or somebody had snuck in to read at the table. Or, I wondered, maybe somebody stole these pages from the library and hid them in here. I knew libraries kept old newspapers for people to read; they were good for history papers in school and college. There was one about hockey from 1949. The Toronto team, the Maple Leafs, won the cup. This was the Toronto Daily Star so they were really glad. There was another one sticking out behind it. That was from the 1949 Toronto paper, too, and I could read the words “Foundation of the City of Halifax 200 Years Ago by Edward Cornwallis.” I picked the pile of papers up to read about Halifax because that’s where I live.
Oh my God! I dropped the stories back on the table. The paper was so hot it burned my fingers! “Ow, that hurt!”
John Rory looked at me as if I had said something weird, so I told him there must have been a fire and the paper was still scorching hot.
“Really?” he said, and he looked through to the fireplace in the living room. “There hasn’t been any fire in there. It’s a fake fireplace. Fake like everything else about this house.” Then he picked up the hockey story, and some other pages, and looked at me. “I don’t feel anything. They’re not hot.”
But I knew what I had felt, and I didn’t want to feel it again. “Let’s go. Now!”
Only then did I remember to worry about leaving fingerprints. Maybe they wouldn’t show up on such old pieces of paper. I didn’t know. And by then I didn’t care. I could still feel the scorching on my fingertips.
We got out of the house, thank God, stuck the window back in, wiped our fingerprints off it, and hopped on our bikes to ride back to Morag’s. I wanted to tell her what happened but, when I got there, the place was full of people. As usual, they were all packed into the kitchen. Mum and Dad were there with Father Burke. And even the Mounties were there. The guy that teased me about my drinking was named Dougald MacDougald, and his partner was named Pierre. I think his last name was Maguire. And Morag was in the midst of them. I wanted to talk to her but not with all of them listening in. So I made a signal with my hand to grab her attention, and then I mouthed the words, “I went to the house.”
She waited a minute and then said, “Excuse me for a sec,” and got up from the kitchen table. They probably thought she was going to the bathroom, but that was okay. When she was gone, I kind of snuck out of the room and followed her to the living room.
“I went to the house,” I said to her. “The right one this time.”
“Oh, did you now, Normie Ruadh? How did that go?”
“My fingers got burnt.”
“How? What did you do?”
I told her how me and “one of my cousins” broke in and wiped our prints away, and how there was hardly anything in the house except spiders and maybe a mouse. I didn’t say the other thing it might have been, streaking across the basement floor. “But that’s not how I burned my fingers. There was a pile of really old newspaper stories. Oh, wait, you must have heard about them from the Mounties.”
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“No, all I heard was that they had found a cat.”
Right. How could I forget that? Morag had come in at the end of the conversation about the kitty that night after the Mountie, Dougald, had left. I could feel my face getting red. But if it showed, Morag didn’t let on.
“Okay, well, the Mounties also told us that night that they had seen these newspaper stories. And when I went in, I picked them up and had to drop them because they felt so hot I thought they were on fire. But they weren’t, and yet they burned my fingers!”
Morag was staring at me, not saying a word. Finally, I felt I’d better say something more. “The stories were about different things. One was about hockey, and another about the North Atlantic Treaty something or other. I noticed another one was about the founding of Halifax, even though these were not Halifax papers. I wanted to look at that one, about Halifax being set up by Cornwallis. There’s a street named after him, and a statue.”
“No wonder your fingers were scorched, touching the cursèd name of Cornwallis!”
“What? Why?”
“He massacred the Highlanders in Scotland after Culloden! You know about the Battle of Culloden.”
“Yes, we sing about it. It’s when the Highlanders fought to put Prince Charlie in as king.”
“That’s right, in 1746. Well, those of our people who were still alive after the battle were hunted down by Cornwallis and his men, who were working for King George of England. Ask Maggie Cameron down the road.”
“Mrs. Beaton who used to be named Cameron before she got married?”
“Aye. I always think of her as Maggie Cameron. Old people from my generation sometimes call me Morag MacAskill because that was my name before I was married and became a Drummond.”
“MacAskill! There was a giant with that name!”
“Indeed there was. And, like me, he was born in Scotland and came here to Cape Breton.”
“Was he related to you?”
“No, though I used to tell the kids at school that he was my grandfather. I was a wicked wee lass, telling tales like that.”
