by Anne Emery
It was no surprise that the kid claimed he had nothing to do with the break-in at Collie MacDonald’s.
“How did you get the black eye?” I asked him.
Jeff didn’t answer. Didn’t have to. We knew the old man. But we persisted anyway.
“Jeff?” I prompted him.
He gave a sullen “Guy at the ball field. It was nothing.”
It was time to change focus.
“Do you know Bonnie MacDonald?”
“Yeah, everybody knows her. She’s in my school.”
“Like her?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Do you like her? Dislike her? Love her?”
These were the only questions so far that had the kid squirming. Finally he said, “She’s all right.” He made an attempt to look as if he didn’t have a care in the world, about Bonnie or anybody or anything else.
“What do you think happened to her?”
“How the Jesus should I know?”
“Do you care?”
“Well . . . yeah. I hope nothing happened to her.”
Dougald took over the questioning.
“What were you doing at her dad’s house?”
“Nothing. I wasn’t there.”
“What happened to your arms and legs?”
“I was out cutting brush.”
“Who for?”
It took him a few seconds but he came up with “Sandy the Scotsman.”
“Like working for free, do you?”
“What do you mean? It wasn’t for free.”
“Sandy the Scotsman’s got a basement full of beaver shit.”
“Hunh?”
“The beaver on the nickel. He’s got a basement full of beaver shit from squeezing his nickels so tight. He wouldn’t pay you two nickels to clear land for him, and he sure as hell wouldn’t give you sick pay for those injuries.”
He didn’t give us any more about his employment history. We kept at him for a while longer, but he continued to stonewall us. We weren’t worried. Somebody would talk, evidence would pop up; we’d get him in the end. But we’d had enough of him for one day and cut him loose.
Chapter V
Normie
All the kids were over at cousin Louise’s house on Friday. Her dad is called Red Archie. Anyway, the kids were there and they were talking about a guy from their school who got picked up by the police! For breaking into Bonnie’s dad’s house! And then there was more bad news about that guy. Two of Bonnie’s friends from school, Laurie and Danuta, were with us because they always hung around with Louise. And Laurie said, “I saw him and Bonnie together one time. It was at night. And she saw me looking at her and she just said ‘hi’ really quick and looked away because she didn’t want me to stop and talk.”
“What?” Danuta yelled out. “She would never go around with Jeff McCurdy. He got kicked out of school last year. He’s a criminal. A juvenile delinquent!”
“They don’t call them that anymore, Danuta. Young offenders.” That was John Rory, who came up behind the group of us.
“Well, okay, then he’s a young offender. He’s bad. He comes from a really bad home. I’ve heard my mum and dad talk about them. The father is really mean, and the mother doesn’t do anything about it. I can’t picture Bonnie going anywhere near the son of people like that.”
“Well, she did,” Laurie said again. “I saw them.”
“Where?”
“On Barra Street.”
“What were they doing?”
“Nothing! Just walking beside each other.”
“And it was at night?”
“Yeah. My dad was walking me home from babysitting, and it was nearly midnight. And there they were.”
“She never told me that,” said Danuta, and it sounded as if her feelings were hurt. I knew she was Bonnie’s best friend at school.
“That’s weird, if she didn’t want you to know. She must have been sneaking out with him and knew what you would say. You would have told her not to be so crazy.”
“I would have for sure.”
“We should tell Sharon and Andy.”
“But that’s telling on her.”
“Danuta, she has been kidnapped! And Jeff, her secret boyfriend, broke into her dad’s house! Jeff may be the guy who stole her away!”
“But he’s only fifteen, and he’s been hanging around like normal. If he had done something to Bonnie, he wouldn’t dare show his face! He’d be scared somebody would catch on.”
“Some of these guys,” John Rory said, “don’t give a shit if anybody catches on. Or they’re so full of themselves they think they’re too smart to get caught.”
“Jeff isn’t any Einstein, John Rory,” Laurie replied. “All he ever gets are crappy marks in school.”
“Well, there you go. He’s not bright enough to worry about looking guilty!”
“What are we going to do with this knowledge?” I asked them all.
“Tell Sharon and Andy,” Laurie said again.
“Yeah, we have to tell them. But let’s do some checking into it ourselves first, so we don’t look stupid if it turns out it couldn’t have been him.”
“Who cares, John Rory?” Danuta said. “He’s already been caught breaking into Bonnie’s dad’s place!”
“Yeah, I know. But he’d be in a lot deeper shit if he k— if he kidnapped Bonnie and did something to her. And if we say he did that, and he didn’t, we’ll be in trouble ourselves.”
Laurie and Danuta went and made a phone call to another friend of theirs from school and asked her if she had seen Bonnie and Jeff together, and that friend called someone else, and later that day, one of them phoned back. She said her brother had seen Jeff McCurdy hanging around an old abandoned grocery store on one of the side streets in the village. So, you know what we did. Laurie and Danuta and John Rory and I went to that store on our bikes. We got off and pretended we were just hanging around on the street and then, when there was nobody else in sight, we snuck into the building. It had front windows with an old scale and some shelves, and one window was broken. There was a back door, and it wasn’t hard to wrench it open, so we went in that way. There wasn’t much left of the grocery store, just dusty, empty wooden and metal shelves, and an old counter where the cash register must have been. There were some faded posters on the walls showing orange trees and cows in a field. But the important thing for us was the staircase leading to the basement. There was no electricity, so it was dark. But we went down. More shelves and crates and rotten orange peels and some scraps of mouldy bread. There was a bit of a stink in there, the way old places smell. But one corner was clean. A big wooden crate had been turned upside down, and two smaller ones were up against it like chairs. And there was more.
“Oh my God!” Danuta cried out. “This is Bonnie’s stuff! That’s her warm-up jacket for the soccer team, and those two scribblers are hers, too. Her English and French notes. And that book, Poets of the Twentieth Century. She loves that stuff. She’s been here.”
Laurie said, “When I saw her and Jeff McCurdy that time, they were close to here.”
Danuta still couldn’t believe it. “Imagine sneaking off to meet Jeff McCurdy! That’s sick.”
“She may not have been down here herself,” said John Rory. “He may have stolen that stuff off her. That would make more sense than her coming in here with her English and French notebooks to do her homework!”
“But why would he take her schoolwork?”
“Only thing he could get his hands on at the time, maybe. Just wanted something of hers. Who knows? The world is full of fruitcakes and shitheads.”
There was also stuff that the other kids said was Jeff’s, including a ball team jacket with his name on it and a baseball bat signed by a guy named Bill Lee.
“We have to tell somebody,
” I said to them. They all said yeah, they knew that. “But we can’t just blab it all over the place, because then he’ll hear about it. And he’ll come here and destroy all the evidence.”
Everybody agreed that would happen. “One of us will tell,” John Rory said.
“I’ll do it,” I offered. “My mum and dad are lawyers. They’re on the other side from the police, at least Dad always is, because he acts for the guys who are charged with the crimes, but he’ll tell the Mounties about this, I know.”
“He gets the bad guys off?” Laurie asked. “How can he stand doing that?”
That hurt my feelings, so I told her, “Dad says everybody is allowed to have a defence, just in case they didn’t really do it. If you got arrested and charged with murder, you’d be glad to have a lawyer. Otherwise, they would just throw you in jail for the rest of your life.”
“But I wouldn’t do it.”
“Sometimes people didn’t do it, and they get charged anyway. The police can make mistakes. But they can’t just arrest people they don’t like, because they know the defence lawyers will be there to argue in court against them.”
“I suppose so.”
“There have been famous cases of innocent guys sent to prison for murder. There was one right here in Cape Breton. I forget the guy’s name, but it took years before the lawyers got him out and proved he didn’t really do it.”
“Donald Marshall. People called him Junior,” said John Rory. “It happened in Sydney.”
“Yeah, that’s his name. So anyway, I’m going to tell Mum and Dad. They’ll know what to do.”
Pierre
Once again, information just fell onto our desks. Hope Ottawa doesn’t get wind of this or they might shut us down, send me back to Montreal and organized crime, so I’ll be earning my pay. This time it was a pack of young kids. They heard the news about Jeff McCurdy, and it turns out one of them had seen Jeff on a midnight stroll with Bonnie MacDonald. Sharon’s cousin, Maura MacNeil, called us with the information just minutes after Dougald received another tip about McCurdy, giving the location of a basement hideout where McCurdy used to spend some of his idle time. The witness who gave us the tip said he had noticed McCurdy loitering about the door of the old Kinlochiel Good Food Shop, which had gone out of business a couple of years before.
The Ident officers went down into the basement of the abandoned shop and struck gold. By that, I mean they found several items belonging to Bonnie MacDonald. A jacket, a couple of school books, and some notes in her handwriting. Same writing as in the sexy-dress note found in her little friend’s knapsack. There was also a pair of reading glasses, the kind you get in the drugstore. They had heavy black frames, not the kind a young girl would wear, and one of the lenses was missing. None of the stuff tested positive for blood, including a baseball bat, and there were no signs of a struggle in or around the cellar. We didn’t have a crime scene, but we had Bonnie and Jeff McCurdy together, and we had Jeff breaking into her father’s house. Time to lean on young McCurdy.
We picked him up and brought him to the detachment and went through his rights again. And once again, he turned down the opportunity to have Maman listen in on the questions and answers.
Dougald and I agreed that I would conduct the interview since I was less of a known quantity to the McCurdy family.
“Jeff, how well did you know Bonnie MacDonald?”
“I already told you. I knew her at school, just like I know a lot of other people.”
“Was she your girlfriend?”
“No!”
“Did you wish she was your girlfriend?”
“If I want a girlfriend, I’ll get a girlfriend, okay? She’s what, twelve?”
“Did you spend time with her, just the two of you?”
That got him rattled. He was wondering what we knew. The best he could come up with was, “I don’t remember.”
“So you did.”
“Hey, I never said that!”
“If you hadn’t spent time with her, you would have said no. So, okay, tell us about the times you spent together.”
“I never.”
“Never what?”
“Spent time with her.”
“Don’t waste our time, Jeff. We know you were with her. You were seen with her. Now tell us.”
We could almost see the wheels turning in his head. He had to own up now. “I’m supposed to remember every time I talked to a kid at school?”
“What did you talk about?”
“I just said I don’t remember.”
The kid was fidgeting and obviously trying to think of something to say that would get us out of his hair. But he knew we were going to be in his hair for the foreseeable future, because any day now we would be charging him with the B&E at Collie MacDonald’s house. The only reason for delaying an arrest was the whole wonky situation with Bonnie’s disappearance. There was the possibility that someone else may have been involved in the break-in, or maybe ordered it. If someone else besides McCurdy was involved, we didn’t want to jump the gun.
Finally, he said, “Any time I saw her, we just talked about school, I guess.”
“What about school?”
“The work.”
“You talked about schoolwork.”
He had a belligerent look about him then, as if he was saying, You wanna make something of it?
“What grade are you in at school, Jeff? Going into which grade in September?”
“Ten. Starting at the high school.”
“And Bonnie is going into seven?”
I was surprised to see a painful-looking flush creep up into Jeff’s face. Caught out in a stupid lie, claiming he was discussing school assignments with a girl three years behind him? I shouldn’t have been surprised. You wouldn’t believe the kinds of things suspects think we are dumb enough to accept. This was at the low end of that spectrum of bullshit. I had a guy in Montreal tell me, with a face as straight as a poker, that he was doing undercover work for the Canadian Army at the time the crime was committed, and that nobody would back up his alibi because his assignment was classified top secret. When we laughed at his claims, he pulled out his ace. “Try and prove I wasn’t undercover.” We told him we would prove he was at the wash house of Camp Tinkiwinki or whatever it was, stealing little girls’ panties. Which we did, ’cause he was. So much for his macho-man alibi. As I say, Jeff’s line that he was doing homework with the young girl who disappeared was hardly worth a reply from us.
It was time to cut the crap. “We found your hideout, Jeff, with Bonnie’s clothing in it.”
All of a sudden he looked as if he was having trouble breathing. We let him suffer for a few minutes, then we changed directions.
“Do you wear glasses?”
From the look on his face, you’d think we asked him if he wore diapers. But he managed to give a sarcastic twist to his voice when he answered, “No. I can see you just fine, even though there’s things I’d rather be looking at than you.”
“Where is she, Jeff?”
“I don’t know! I don’t fucking know!”
“Come clean with us, Jeff, and it will go a lot better for you later on. We will look kindly, the court will look kindly, the whole island of Cape Breton will look kindly on a guy who helps us find this young girl, who doesn’t hold out on us any longer, who doesn’t make it any more agonizing for her family. Rather than the way everybody will look on a guy who keeps the agony going for us all.”
The kid seemed to shrink into himself. I leaned in closer. “You’re only fifteen years old. A young offender. You probably didn’t mean to hurt Bonnie. Something happened. You didn’t intend to do it. The court will take that into consideration, along with your young age, if you cooperate and put an end to this now.”
He was white in the face and shaky, no doubt picturing the day the door clanged shut behind
him as he began to serve his remaining teenage years in custody. When he finally spoke, though, it was another denial. He was nearly in tears, but he said, “I didn’t touch her. I don’t know where she went.”
“Went?” My voice was sharper than I intended. “Are you saying she went somewhere, as in went of her own free will?”
“I don’t fucking know!”
Monty
It wasn’t the kind of visit we had promised when we enticed Father Brennan Burke to take the Cape Breton option for his priestly retreat this summer. Not that he needed much persuading. He had been with us in Cape Breton before and knew he could anticipate lots of music and tall tales and a little dileag and relaxation, and maybe a tune from Normie on her fiddle. Everything would be copacetic. And that’s how we had billed it. Of course he had lots of notice to the contrary, once the news came out about Bonnie in July. So, even before he crossed the causeway, he knew things were going to be considerably more subdued than originally planned. But that did not mean he had to spend all his time at Holy Cross church in Glace Bay; that would not do anything to solve the problem.
He had been with us in the afternoon when we celebrated the third birthday of little Dominic. Maura and her mum, Catherine, put up balloons and streamers and the other accoutrements of a little kid’s party, and we invited a bunch of young cousins for lunch and cake and games. The little fellow nearly expired with joy when he opened all his presents, but his favourite was a toy airplane, a turboprop, that Normie had spotted on a shopping trip to Sydney. So he and his cousins got to work constructing an airport with a control tower and runway. Sure there was a bit of broken crockery when the plane veered off course, and a tearful scene when somebody suggested pilot error as the likely cause. But all in all it was a smashing success.
