She waved that off. “This is grade four. There’s always a nine-year-old girl who will probably be a teacher herself one day, a little bossy, loves to have extra responsibilities, doesn’t mind ratting out the misbehavers, even if they’re her friends.”
“And you have one of those?”
“I was one of those. And I have one of those. They won’t mess with her.” Both of us laughed and took seats, Holly Dole on the leather sofa, me back on my chair. “I also have the TA from the next classroom sitting in for me. She can only stay a few minutes.”
“Miss Lois told you why I’m here … why I wanted to talk to you?”
“She did, yes.”
“I appreciate your speaking with me. Did you teach Faith?”
“I’m happy to say I did — the year before … before it happened. Grade five. She truly was a wonderful person. Not a wonderful child, a wonderful person. I’m sure you will understand, Mr. Cullen, that it is not possible after thirty years in the classroom to remember every student. But you do remember some. Forever. I would have remembered Faith even if she had not been …” She stopped, unable to say the word.
I nodded. “Did everybody feel the same way about her?”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone did her harm, Mrs. Dole. It’s possible that someone hated her. Jealousy, maybe?”
“Wasn’t it a sex crime?”
“Faith was naked when she was found, but she’d not been violated. The police believe the killer was interrupted or panicked without completing what he had started.”
“But wouldn’t that be random, then?”
“Possibly.” I nodded. “But not necessarily. Faith went into that backyard, almost certainly having been tricked or lured there by the killer. It seems possible that she may have known her attacker.”
“Killer, attacker,” Holly Dole repeated. She leaned forward. “I’m hating this conversation, Mr. Cullen. Anyway, to answer your question, we get to know very few of the students outside the school. I wouldn’t be able to say if there was someone out there who didn’t like her. But I can’t imagine anyone hating Faith enough to want to take her life.”
“I apologize for dredging up terrible memories. Just one more thing — do you remember a student named Terry Maughan?”
She thought a moment, then shook her head. “As I mentioned, Mr. Cullen, I wish I could remember them all, but I just can’t. I’m sorry.”
“His father was a policeman. And one of the investigators on the Faith Unruh case.”
She sat back down. “Wait … oh, yes, I do remember. Terry’s father, the policeman. He came here a few times to do presentations to the kids. You know the kind of thing — there’s no reason to fear the police; they’re our friends — that sort of message. Then I remember him coming to the school and questioning people, including me. We saw a different side of him then, I remember. Very businesslike. Very serious. As you would expect, of course.”
I thought about that. “So, did he ever come to your classroom to do a presentation?”
“Oh, yes, absolutely. Two or three times at least.”
“So he might have done a presentation when Faith was in your class.”
“I can’t say that for certain, but I would think that’s possible. I suppose it must have been very difficult for him, you know, investigating the murder of a child he might have met.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Wait a minute, that’s not where you’re going with this, is it? You can’t think —”
I held my hand up. “I don’t think anything, Mrs. Dole. We’re just trying to connect some dots. So far, we haven’t been able to connect very many. So we ask questions and hope that one of the answers points us in the right direction. Believe me, it’s nothing more than that. Just one last question: Now that we’ve established that Terry Maughan was the son of the investigating officer, does that ring any bells as far as Terry is concerned?”
“Let me think about that.” She paused a moment, then nodded. “I don’t remember him well, it was a long time ago, but I do remember that a lot of the kids thought he was kind of a big deal because his dad was a policeman. And I think Terry was part of the presentations a couple of times. Yes, his dad used him as an example a few times, it was quite funny.”
She paused before adding, “Another thing I recall, as I think back on it, was that it really seemed that Terry worshipped his dad, wanted to be a policeman himself when he grew up. I don’t know if he ever made it. Sorry, that’s about all I can tell you.”
“Okay, there’s just one last thing.”
“You’ve said that three times.”
I held up two fingers. “Scout’s honour this time. Faith’s teacher that last year, Noelle Sensibaugh, I was hoping to talk to her, as well.”
Holly Cole’s shoulders sagged. “Another tragedy, and I’m not sure that it’s totally unrelated.”
“What do you mean?”
“Noelle and I were friends. Not get-together-every-day-after-school friends, but I went to her house, knew her kids, she came to our place a couple of times. She was a single mom and so was I, so we had that in common. Anyway, she was off on stress leave for the last few weeks of that year after Faith’s death. She came back in September, but she didn’t stay, just couldn’t get past what had happened. They moved to Manitoba — Russell, I think it was — and she taught there for a number of years. We kind of lost contact. Then about ten years ago I heard that she was in a care centre in Regina with dementia. I contacted the facility, thinking I’d try to get out there and see her, but I was told that she was too far gone … she wouldn’t know me.”
She paused and looked down. I thought there might be a tear or two. “I’m ashamed to say I don’t know if she’s still alive or … I just didn’t keep up after that.”
She stood up then. The interview was over. I stood and shook her hand. “Thank you so much. You’ve been great, and it is helpful, believe me.”
She nodded. Murmured something I didn’t catch, and left the staff room, walking quickly to get back to her students and the kid in charge of kids. I followed her out and turned the opposite way in the hall, headed back to the office.
Lois Meeker’s smile greeted me and she held up a weathered-looking file folder. “Bingo,” she said.
“Whatever they’re paying you, it’s not enough.”
She laughed. I leaned on the counter as she opened the folder, extracted an eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper and read. “Terry Maughan attended Kilkenny for two and a half years. Came here partway through grade seven and finished his junior high here in 1992. The school is K to eight now, but back then it went up to grade nine. I’m not sure what high school he went to after that, but living in this part of the city, it was probably Central or maybe Ernest Manning. I’ve got his academic record here, but it won’t tell you much.”
“What about disciplinary stuff?” I asked. “He get into any trouble while he was here?”
She scanned the pages again. “You understand that I can’t give you specifics … but in general terms it doesn’t look like anything major. Got sent to the office a few times for acting out in class and once, no, maybe twice for bullying, it says here. But there’s no details other than that he got a couple of detentions. If it had been serious, there would have been parent conferences, maybe suspensions, but I don’t see anything like that.”
“Doesn’t say who he was bullying, I don’t suppose.”
Another glance at the contents of the file folder and a shake of the head. “Sorry.”
“Any siblings?”
Another look at the file, a head shake. “Looks like he was an only child.”
“Does the folder contain the address for Terry Maughan?”
This time she tore a small piece of paper from a notepad and, with a final look at the contents of the file folder, jotted something on the paper, then handed it to me.
“Listen, I really appreciate your help with this,” I told her. �
�Both you and Ms. Dole have been great. I’m going to get out of here and let you get back to work.” I stepped forward and shook her hand.
“Mr. Cullen, I wish you luck with your investigation. The closure would mean so much to so many people.”
“We’re going to do our best, but a case this old, this cold, I can’t guarantee we’ll be successful.”
“Well, don’t hesitate to call or stop by if there’s anything else we can do. Especially if it’s something that’s not against regulations.”
I smiled, said goodbye, and walked out into the southern Alberta sunshine that made summer amazing and winter bearable. But instead of climbing back into my car, I decided to walk the route Faith Unruh had walked the day of her murder.
It was four blocks to her friend Jasmine’s house, then another block to Faith’s home. But, of course, she hadn’t reached home that day, had been lured somehow into the backyard of the house three doors down and across the street … and murdered.
I walked the speed I thought kids would walk as they made their way home from school. Ten minutes later I passed the house where Kennedy had lived and conducted his surveillance for so many years. It was on the same side of the street as the Unruh home. I walked farther down the street and stood in front of what I called the murder house; I’d given it that designation only to differentiate it in my mind from the Unruh family dwelling.
This was the first time I’d really thought about the fact that the house where Faith was murdered was actually past her own home if she walked the normal way from her friend Jasmine’s house. That, it seemed to me, clinched the fact that her killer had lured her to the yard where she died. He would have had to speak to her before she went into her house, and convince her to walk past her home — three doors down, across the street — and into the backyard.
I stayed there for maybe fifteen minutes, then walked to the end of the block, turned right, walked another half block, and came back up the alley behind the murder house, the alley where Kennedy’s life had come to a violent conclusion.
I looked at the wooden frame that housed the garbage cans behind the yard where Faith had died. No new marks. Either the killer — if that’s who had made the marks — had not returned to the alley since Kennedy’s death, or he didn’t feel the need to record his visits after Kennedy and his surveillance were no longer factors. I walked the rest of the way down the alley and made my way slowly back to the school and my car, thinking as I walked about what I’d learned that day.
Maybe there was something there and maybe there wasn’t. But it was interesting to me that one of the cops who investigated the murder of Faith Unruh may have met her in another context. Although meeting one student in a classroom full of students — even in days when class sizes were manageable — may be of no consequence. Unless, of course, he knew Faith outside the school, as happens in neighbourhoods — people often know, or at least know of, the kids who populate that area. And what about Terry Maughan? He did know Faith; Jasmine Hemmerling had told me about the kid named Terry whose dad was a cop and who liked to bug her and her friend Faith. Could there have been a connection between the cop who did presentations in the school, the son who worshipped his dad and didn’t mind doing a little bullying, and the little girl who lost her life just after her eleventh birthday?
I pulled out the piece of paper and read the address of the house the Maughans had lived in when Terry had been a student at Kilkenny School. It couldn’t have been more than three or four blocks from the school, albeit in the opposite direction from the Unruh house. Still … we weren’t talking a lot of distance.
I wanted to talk to Terry Maughan, assuming, of course, that he was still alive and that he lived in close enough proximity that a face-to-face chat was actually feasible.
I decided to abandon technology for the moment and try the local phone directory. It took much longer to actually locate a phone book than it did to learn that Terry Maughan was not listed. If he lived in Calgary, he had an unlisted number, or, like more and more people were doing, he had gone away from a land line and used only a cellphone.
I called Cobb and started talking before he finished saying hi. “Maughan’s son went to the same school as Faith Unruh. He was two or three years older but he knew her, teased her sometimes.”
Cobb didn’t say anything for a while. “You get a first name?”
“Yeah. Terry. Tried to get a phone number. No luck. I haven’t been able to find out if he still lives in the city or not. And something else — Maughan, the cop, came to the school from time to time to do presentations to different classes. It’s likely that he did at least one of those presentations for Faith’s class. And some of the time Terry helped out with the presentations.”
“You get all this from Faith’s friend?”
“Jasmine Hemmerling? Some, not all of it. I talked to the school secretary and a teacher who’s still at the school and was Faith’s teacher the year before the murder.”
There was silence at the other end of the line. I was used to that — it meant Cobb was thinking hard about something, and it was better if I didn’t interrupt.
“Good work on this, Adam. I need to think about how we follow up on what you’ve got here. In the meantime, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep working on locating Terry. You get anything on the families that live in the two houses?”
“Yeah. Nothing there. At least not the people who live there now. Both moved to Calgary well after the murder, one family from Saskatchewan, the other from India. There was at least one other family who lived in the Unruh house between when Faith’s parents owned it and when the people who live there now bought it. Want me to pursue that?”
“Maybe, but not right now. I’ve got something else for us to check out first.”
“Sure, what’s up?”
“I located Faith’s mom, Rhoda Curly. The former Rhoda Unruh has moved back to Calgary from Victoria. And she’s no longer married to the guy she took up with after Faith’s dad died. She works at a pet shop in Bowness. She said we could come by the place tomorrow afternoon. She’ll take her break when we get there. You got anything on?”
“Nope, free and clear.”
“Good. And I’ve got a trunk full of tapes. The homicide cops were only too happy to have you spend the rest of your life looking at footage so they wouldn’t have to. But the deal is, we see anything, we let them know right away.”
“I’m good with that.”
“Right, I’ll bring them along. Gotta go. See you tomorrow.”
He was gone and I sat staring at the phone, a little impatient. I felt that maybe there was something to the Maughan father and son lead and I was anxious to get at it. But I also realized that we were investigating a cold case — a twenty-six-year-old cold case. Everything would be the same tomorrow as it was today. And I knew that Cobb was less impulsive than I was. He liked to think about things — “let it soak” was how he often put it.
Impatience aside, I was in a pretty upbeat mood and called Jill to see if she and Kyla could do dinner.
“Sorry, babe, Kyla’s sleeping over at Josie’s house. They’ve got an early rehearsal of a play they’ve written. They’re presenting it at noon tomorrow, so this is the last one before the big show.”
“I believe that’s called a dress rehearsal in theatrical circles.”
“About which you know …?”
“Next to nothing.”
We both laughed.
“If it’s not too much of a disappointment for you, I’m available for dinner,” Jill said.
“Well, I guess if you’re all there is, I’ll have to settle.”
“Listen, mister, you know that option you sometimes exercise — the one that has you sleep at my house, in my bed?”
“Yes, I’m familiar with that option.”
“You’re about two seconds from having that option revoked for a really long time.”
“Ha, like you could resist me.”
We laughed again and
I told her I’d pick her up at six. I called Caesar’s and made a reservation for six thirty, then drove home, went for a long, slow run, and followed that up with a longer, slower shower before heading out to spend the evening with the woman I loved.
ELEVEN
“I’ve decided to take the job,” Jill said as we waited for our dessert.
“I’m happy for you,” I said. And I was.
Jill cared as much about the Let the Sunshine Inn as I did about every story I wrote for publication. She was as passionate and caring about every person who set foot in the place as it was possible to be. She’d be an amazing director, and I told her so.
“It’s not enough to care,” she told me, smiling Jill now replaced by serious Jill. “I hope I know enough and can learn enough to actually be good at this.”
“I know I’m biased, and because of that, my opinion might be less valid than some, but I think the very fact that you recognize you’ll need to learn in order to be really good is a huge first step.”
“Thanks, Coach.”
“Do you remember how we met?”
“Yeah,” she was smiling again. “You and Mike were looking for Jay Blevins and you came to the Inn. I put you to work helping me sort food bank items.”
“And that’s my point,” I said. “You recognized my obvious sorting talents though you’d never met me before — that’s a sign of real leadership.”
“I think maybe you’ve had too much wine.”
“Not yet, but I might before the night is over. We’re celebrating.”
The celebration continued long after we got back to Jill’s house; in fact, it continued through much of the night. But all celebratory thoughts disappeared the next morning when I climbed into the Accord and saw the package sitting on the passenger seat, a handwritten note scrawled on half a sheet of paper tucked neatly under it.
It read, “Same place as last time. 6:00 p.m. Tuesday. Do NOT let us down, Scribe. Jill and cute little Kyla wouldn’t want you to either. Have a nice drive.”
None So Deadly Page 17
