Lament for Bonnie

by Anne Emery

  The second bear, shown in another close-up, was dressed in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt depicting an old-style television set with a “rabbit ears” antenna. In the centre of the screen was the face of Elvis Presley, his lip curled up in a snarl. The caption underneath read “Really Big Show,” an obvious reference to the Ed Sullivan Show back in the heyday of 1950s TV. I was not aware of any connection between the Clan Donnie band and the music of Elvis Presley, but that was probably beside the point. Whatever the point was, it was about Bonnie. And whoever had staged this scene was sending a message: a taunt or a hint or just a bit of viciousness at the expense of the family. It was certainly a remote setting, where the perpetrator could have carried the items in and set them up without being observed. Then all he had to do to bring attention to his handiwork was make an emergency call to bring in the authorities.

  “The Ident section is there now,” Dougald said. The technical team, checking for fingerprints, shoe prints, and other evidence. Including blood. He looked at Maura. “Does this tell you anything?”

  “Not a thing, aside from the fact that that is obviously Bonnie. If there is some other kind of message or link, it’s beyond me. And if there is no meaning, if this is just some sick bastard’s idea of a joke, that’s beyond me, too. Jesus!”

  Pierre was glaring at the pictures. “Somebody’s trying to fuck with our heads.”

  “We’re going out now to tell the family,” said Dougald. “See if they can shed any light on this.”

  “They’re all at Ginny’s place today, Dougald.” Maura’s voice was so soft as to be almost unrecognizable.

  “We’ll follow you out,” I said. “We won’t get in the way.” In other words, we wouldn’t burst into the house first and blow it for the police, who would want the family’s unprepared — unrehearsed — reaction.

  Maura got behind the wheel, and the three of us drove to Kinlochiel behind the Mounties in their unmarked car. All the way there, we asked each other rhetorical questions about the kind of person who would achieve gratification by putting on such a display. We could do no better than repeat the Acadian-French-accented words of Sergeant Pierre Maguire: “Somebody’s trying to fuck with our heads.”

  The police pulled in at Ginny’s house, and we waited outside to give them a few minutes. Then we headed in. Sharon was there with Ginny and old Morag. Bonnie’s mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. The women were all in the living room with glasses of red wine.

  I thought the two Mounties would have delivered the news by now, but they must have opened with small talk, maybe to relax everyone, because they were just at the beginning of their tale. “. . . old shed with gardening tools and flower boxes and a cellar underneath, with a home distillery in it.”

  Morag said, “That’d be Glory Hally Lewis’s place.”

  “Who?”

  “Harold Lewis. Called himself Hal, so of course he became Glory Hally Lewis. I remember your Collie,” she said to Sharon, “would tell Glory Hally he was going to write a song someday about him, and Collie would spread his arms out and say, ‘Glory Hallelujah! Have a drink of shine and praise the Lord!’ Anyway, Glory Hally built a shed over the cellar to hide the entrance.”

  “Sharon,” Dougald said, and she immediately tensed up. “There were some items down in the cellar.”

  “What?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “Did Bonnie have a teddy bear about this big?” He spread his hands about eighteen inches apart to show its height.

  “I . . . I . . .” Sharon looked at her mother and grandmother as if they might be able to help.

  “Would she have dressed a teddy to look like her, in her kilt and dancing shoes and a wig of black hair?”

  “She . . . she would love that, but she’s never done it. I’d know if she had. She would have asked me to make the clothes or help her. Bonnie’s efforts at sewing aren’t very, well . . . it’s not one of her strengths, let’s say. Heather and Jockie have teddy bears, but I saw them when I cleaned their rooms this morning. Why? What did you see down there?”

  “There was a teddy bear dressed like . . . dressed the way I described.”

  “Oh God!”

  “It was a teddy bears’ picnic sort of thing, with a doll’s china tea set.”

  “What on earth? It must have been just kids playing. They shouldn’t be down there, but you know kids.”

  “Well, it probably wasn’t little children who set this up. We’re trying to trace the call from whoever phoned to draw attention to the display. Now, at the table, there was another bear as well. The bear looked fairly new, like the other one, but it had on an old-fashioned T-shirt, with a picture of Elvis. Does that mean anything at all to you?”

  Sharon merely shook her head.

  “There are still lots of Elvis fans around so it may have no meaning, just a shirt that was available. This one showed him on the Ed Sullivan Show.”

  “I remember that!” Maura said.

  “Me, too,” I chimed in. “Ed Sullivan had declared that he would never have Elvis on his show.”

  “No, young Presley was considered quite naughty back in 1956, with that eff-you expression on his face and those hip movements.”

  “But when Sullivan saw the size of the audience that tuned in to Elvis on another show, he did an about-face and booked him for the program.”

  I knew we were babbling. It was a case of the nerves. I looked over at Sharon and her mother and grandmother and tried to think of something comforting to say. But it was strange. Ginny MacDonald’s face was nearly as white as her hair, and she was clutching the armrests of her chair as if she were afraid of falling off. Morag had her in the sights of her coal black eyes.

  Maura asked what they were thinking, but neither Ginny nor Morag breathed a word. It was as if there was nobody else in the room.

  Normie

  It was so much fun having the birthday party for Dominic at Grandma Catherine’s house in Glace Bay that I could almost pretend life was good and normal. Could almost put out of my mind the picture Morag described — a picture I had nightmares about — of evil all around Bonnie like poison gas. When I was with Dominic, I pushed that out of my head. My little brother is so cute! He has black hair and dark eyes and looks Italian, which they say he is. Half, anyway. He was born when my mum and dad were separated, but Daddy moved back in with us last year, and nobody cares about all that now. And Dominic loved the airplane I got for him, and he sat on my knee and used the table as a runway when we were having our cake.

  I came back to Kinlochiel the day after that, Sunday, and I heard everybody talking about the teddy bears’ picnic they found under some old guy’s shed. It was a place where the guy made booze that was against the law. And I wanted to see it. So did John Rory, after I phoned him and told him all about it. He couldn’t come to Kinlochiel till Monday, so I waited. By the time he came over to Morag’s and we got on our bikes, he knew exactly how to get there, out on the country roads. So we rode out there. We hopped off our bikes and hid them behind the gardening shed, so nobody could tell from driving by on the road that we were sneaking in there. John Rory’s bike had a light, so he unhooked it and brought it with him. We knew it would be dark in the cellar.

  “We’re not going in if there’s crime scene tape around the place,” John Rory said.

  But there wasn’t any. The police must have finished their investigation. The little shack that the guy had built over the booze factory just had garden rakes and stuff in it. And Captain Morgan rum bottles. He must have guzzled all the Captain Morgan and then used the bottles for the stuff he made himself. The interesting part was the floor; it was really a secret trap door, except that the secret was out now. John Rory picked up one end of it, and I took the other. It was really heavy but we were able to move it out of place so we could go underground. There was no ladder or set of stairs; you had to jump down
to the dirt floor. He went first and helped me down, so I didn’t hurt myself. Good thing we had the light. Before he turned it on, I had never been in such a dark place.

  But we did have the light. And there was the picnic, Bonnie and the other teddy with a little china tea set. I was wishing I could have it, but I knew I couldn’t steal something from there. All these things might be clues to whatever happened to Bonnie. And I felt really spooked down there. This was all put together by somebody who was mean. Somebody who was bad. Because if he had wanted to set up a nice little picnic scene to say, “We miss you, Bonnie, and we hope you are somewhere as safe as a teddy bears’ picnic,” he wouldn’t have hidden it under the ground. The guy who did it had made a fake call to the Mounties or the ambulance or somebody else important to get them to see this. I didn’t dare touch anything because of how my fingers got burned the time I picked up the papers in that crazy-looking house with the garages.

  “What a creep, whoever did this,” John Rory said. “It’s as if he’s making fun of Bonnie, or making a joke out of her being missing. Why else would he go to all the trouble of doing this? He must be a complete sicko.”

  “Yeah, I know. How come there are people like that in the world?”

  “I don’t know. Makes me think I should study criminals and weirdoes when I grow up. Go into the prisons and hospitals for the criminally insane and try to find out what makes them tick.”

  “What would you be? A scientist?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Or a doctor. A shrink, I suppose.”

  “Wouldn’t you be scared? Or really upset, spending all that time with dangerous people? My dad has to do that because he’s a criminal lawyer. He has to act for the bad guys. He says sometimes they didn’t do it. But most of them are guilty.”

  “Pretty depressing, I imagine.”

  “He says he gets ‘burnt out’ sometimes by all the bad stuff.”

  “Yeah, I would think so.”

  “But he told me and my brother Tommy Douglas that most of his clients aren’t really bad. They come from bad homes where they learn bad habits. They do bad things, or they do stupid things on the spur of the moment and get caught. But he says most of them aren’t truly evil. Only a few.”

  “Well, I’d say it’s one of those few that’s done this. Taken Bonnie and then rubbed everybody’s nose in it by setting up this scene.”

  “What if he comes back?” I knew I sounded like a scaredy-cat, but I couldn’t help it. “What if he set this up and made the secret call, just so he can catch people coming to look, and then he’ll grab them?! He could even . . .” I whipped around and looked behind me into the blackness. I banged into something and jumped a foot off the ground. John Rory shone his light on it. It was a big copper tank with skinny tubes going to smaller copper containers. The booze machine. But I was too scared to even look it over or wonder how it worked. I had to make myself whisper because a really terrifying idea had come into my head. “What if he’s lurking there in the dark? And he’s going to come and get us? We have to get out of here!”

  John Rory reached out and patted me on top of my curls. “Fear not, cuz. The guy’s not in here. He wouldn’t come back this soon. He can’t be sure that the Mounties don’t have a surveillance team watching the place. That’s probably why they left everything in place; they’ll want to see if anyone shows up, maybe changes things or adds something new.”

  “Do you think the Mounties are out there hidden somewhere and looking through binoculars?”

  “Could be.”

  “Oh my God!”

  “What?”

  “They already caught me, and they let me off with a warning!”

  He looked at me as if I was loony. “Caught you doing what?”

  I whispered again. “Drinking.”

  He cracked up at that. “Normie. They have better things to do than go after somebody like you for . . . What were you drinking?”

  “Wine.”

  “Where were you drinking at? Out behind the barn? Or were you swilling cheap wine out of a bottle in a brown paper bag out behind the Legion in Glace Bay?”

  He was teasing me. “No, at Morag’s house. One of the Mounties came in and saw me.”

  “But he didn’t put you in handcuffs and haul you away.”

  “No, he said he’d let it go. This time. I think he was joking. But now I’m being bad again, sneaking into a crime scene, and if they’re out there with binoculars . . .”

  “They’re gonna take ya downtown. Book ’er, Danno.”

  “Ha ha. They can’t because I’m only eleven. But wait! Can they keep a list and hold off and arrest me later for the things I did this year?”

  “No. Let’s get you out of here. This place has you spooked.”

  “Aren’t you spooked yourself, John Rory?”

  “Nah, I’m a man.”

  He made himself walk funny, like a tough guy in the movies, and I started to laugh. Then I felt guilty, laughing in front of this creepy scene that was making a joke out of Bonnie being gone.

  “Here,” he said, and he bent down and picked something up. There were pieces of coal on the floor up against the basement wall. “Glory Hally was using coal for his stone furnace.”

  “Furnace?”

  “Yeah, you need a heat source under the still to heat the mash so the alcohol will evaporate. That’s how it’s distilled. Hence the word ‘still.’”

  “So that’s what it means?”

  “Right. And, being a good Caper, he used coal. The perp — the sicko who set up this picnic — must have shoved the coal out of the way when he put the table and chairs in place.” John Rory had picked up two big lumps of it. “This is bootleg coal.”

  “What? Bootleggers don’t make coal! You dig it out of the ground. The miners do.”

  “No, I mean they dig their own mines on their own properties. Or they used to, anyway. So they wouldn’t have to pay for it.” He held one chunk of it out to me. “An early Christmas present. I’m John Rory Santa MacDonald, and this is your lump of coal.” Then he said, “I should give you a whole stack of it to take up and sell. I’ll take half the profits. You’ll be the mule.”

  “Mule!”

  “Yeah, the courier. When drug dealers want to get drugs moved somewhere, they give it to somebody else to carry, and they call the guy a mule. That’s you, because you’re too young to get arrested. So you do my dirty work, and I get half the money from the bootleg coal. And we’ll fire up the still and sell moonshine while we’re at it.”

  “What are you trying to do, b’y, get me in trouble?”

  “Yes!” It sounded like “yayss.”

  “My very own cousin turns out to be ‘the wrong crowd.’ The type I’m not supposed to hang around with!”

  “All right, we won’t go into business. I’ll find another henchman. But here, take one anyway.”

  “You keep it.” I didn’t want to touch anything down there.

  “Okay. I’m gonna save these for my sisters. Their stockings at Christmas. There. My shopping is done four months early!”

  I laughed and then I felt bad again about seeming to have fun when Bonnie was the victim of a crime. I looked at John Rory and saw him looking back at the tea party, and I could tell from his face that he felt bad, too. But he didn’t say anything about it, so neither did I.

  When we were out in the daylight again, I peered all around. “I don’t see any Mounties.”

  “You wouldn’t. They’d be in hiding. Or maybe they set up a camera in one of the trees.”

  That was the fastest I ever rode a bike in my life, getting away from there. When we got back to Morag’s and wheeled the bikes into the barn, we went into the house, and Morag invited us to supper with an old couple she had visiting. We both said yes and thanks. John Rory put the lumps of coal down on the counter and washed his hands because the
y were black. Then he whispered to me that the two old people had asked for haggis for supper, and Morag had it all ready to serve. It’s not polite to refuse to eat what’s put in front of you. Haggis is — I know this sounds unbelievable, but it’s true — haggis is a bunch of sheep’s guts. The heart and liver and lungs! It’s all mixed up with other stuff. Inside the sheep’s own stomach! I know this because one time Father Burke was over at our house, and Mum pretended we were going to serve him haggis for supper, and she read out the recipe listing all the gross things that were in it, and his face turned white. And she cracked up laughing at him. But it wasn’t so funny now, when I thought I might have to eat it myself or even have to look at it.

  Maybe I could offer to get on a bike and go to the store and get something else. Did I have any money? Probably not enough to feed five people. Okay, I would just fake being sick. But I’d check first, just in case. “Greatgran Morag, is there anything I can help with for the dinner?”

  “Thank you, little one. But it’s all ready. Just has to be heated up a bit.”

  “Oh, good.” Then I couldn’t help myself. “What is it?”

  “Fettuccine Alfredo.” Whew! Something Italian, so it would be good.

  I never knew Morag could be so funny. The old folks who were at dinner with us were really nice. They were Mr. and Mrs. Fraser from Inverness County on the other side of the island, and they told Morag that where they lived was the true home of Celtic music and the Gaelic language, and not our side of the island. And they started talking really fast in Gaelic, so they could then show that Morag couldn’t understand them. But she did and said something that must have been saucy back at them, and they said she probably hadn’t really understood their words, but that she had cheated and read their minds before they spoke. Morag said, “Ye will never know, will ye?”