by Gail Bowen
“There’s nothing going on that you have to know about now,” I said. “It’ll all be there tomorrow.”
He looked at me hard. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“Then we should enjoy tonight,” he said simply. “Are you and Taylor ready to come to the cottage?”
“The one with the squeaky screen door and the dishes that don’t match and the wood box full of old Saturday Nights?” I said.
“The same,” he said.
“My car is parked up there behind the shacks. Why don’t you take Blaine up and get him settled?” I said. “I’ll be right along, but there’s some business I have to take care of. Could you give me five minutes?”
He smiled at me. “I told you before, Jo, I’m a patient man.”
I took Taylor and we walked to the next dock and watched as Jackie made sure the big boat was safely moored. When he finished, he leaped out, graceful as a cat, and walked to the end of the dock. We followed him. The sun was dropping in the sky; as it fell, it made a path of light on the water. The fishermen’s boats were heading toward shore. Time to come home.
It was Taylor who saw it first. She grabbed my hand and pointed. “Look,” she said, “there’s a fire over there, where we were.”
At first, it was just a kind of heat shimmer in the sky above the channel, then the smoke began to rise, and the acrid smell of burning wood began to drift toward us. We watched in silence as the sky close to the water glowed red and then grew dark.
When the smoke thinned into fingers that seemed to reach into the sky, I touched Jackie’s arm. “When that boy came over and talked to you in the boat before we left, what did he want?”
“Matches,” Jackie said. “Matches so he could set his bed on fire.”
“I’ll take that drink now,” I said.
The rye burned my throat, but it felt good. As I handed the bottle to Jackie, the sun glinted off the Wandering Soul bracelet. It was time. I slid the bracelet off and handed it to Jackie.
“I think she’d want you to have it,” I said.
He touched the letters carefully with his forefinger, like a blind man reading Braille. Then he pulled his arm back and, in a graceful sweep, he skipped the bracelet across the water. For a heartbeat, it bounced along, flashing in the light from the dying sun; then it sank beneath the surface without a trace.
CHAPTER
13
I made one final trip to Lorraine’s island. It was the morning after the fire. Taylor and I had spent the night at Keith’s cabin. We had all been too tired for anything beyond bathing in the lake and collapsing into bed; sleep had come easily. The next morning, early, very early, Taylor woke me up. She’d been awakened by a scratching at the window. It was Jackie Desjarlais.
“I want to take you and Little Sister to breakfast,” he whispered. “I’ve got something I need to talk to you about.”
I looked into the bedroom with the twin beds; Keith and his father were still sleeping. Taylor, ready for adventure, had already pulled her shorts on. I wrote a note for Keith and slid it under the sugar bowl on the kitchen table, then I splashed water on my face, rinsed out my mouth and pulled on yesterday’s clothes. Everything else was still in suitcases at the shacks.
We had breakfast at the café next to the hotel. When we got there, an old man was sitting on the porch watching two dogs fighting in the dirt out front. They were the same dogs who’d been fighting the day we arrived at Blue Heron Point. When we left the restaurant, the old man was still there, and so were the dogs.
We walked down to the docks. For a while we just listened to the water lap the shore, then Jackie lit a cigarette and turned to me. “I’m going out there for a last look,” he said. “I want to make sure there’s nothing left of that fucker. You want to come along?”
“Yes,” I said, “I think we do.”
As we pushed off from land, it had seemed like a perfect day. The water was shimmering in the summer sunlight, and the sky was as cloudless and blue as the sky in the postcard Lorraine left when she abducted Taylor. But as we came through the narrows, the smell of wood smoke was heavy, and in the north a cloud, dense and malevolent, hung in the air above the island.
We moved slowly around the shoreline. We were, I think, stunned by the enormity of what had happened in the past twenty-four hours. The devastation was Biblical. The pines that had hidden the Lily Pad from prying eyes had been savaged by the fire. Stripped of needles and branches, they seemed spectral in the hazy air. The building was in ruins; nothing remained of it but a charred and smouldering skeleton. At the back, the steel door to the storage room hung crazily from its metal frame, guarding nothing. Flames had licked the playground equipment black, but it had survived, at least for a while. Unused, forgotten, it would rust and corrode; some day, in a hundred years, or a thousand, it would be gone, too.
“I can’t believe that nobody even came out to the island to try to save it,” I had said to Jackie as we headed back across the lake.
He had shrugged. “I think a lot of people in town were glad to see it burn. A lotta secrets in that building. A lotta things people want forgotten.” Then he had turned to Taylor and smiled. “Come on, Little Sister. Time to learn how to drive a boat.”
She moved to sit beside him. As she steered the boat across the shining lake, her face was flushed with pride. So was Jackie’s. Once Theresa Desjarlais had taught her brother how to guide a boat through uncertain waters; now it was her brother’s turn. As if he’d read my mind, Jackie Desjarlais looked up at me and yelled over the sound of the motor, “It all comes around, eh?”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling back. “It all comes around.”
Mieka and Greg were married in the chapel of St. Paul’s Cathedral on Labour Day weekend. It was a small wedding. Hilda McCourt came down from Saskatoon, and Jill Osiowy was there to tape the ceremony for the mother who was not there. But these old friends aside, just Keith, Blaine and my children and I were sitting in the pews of that old and beautiful chapel.
In July, the papers had been filled with stories about Lorraine and Con O’Malley. At the beginning of August, the police solved the Little Flower case. When he realized that there would be no big payoff from NationTV, Darren Wolfe decided to become the police’s star witness. His information was right on the money. The police moved quickly with their arrests, and the familiar picture of Con O’Malley touching the hibiscus in Lorraine’s hair gave way to shots of four young pimps with smouldering eyes being escorted to and from their court appearances. As Tom Zaba had surmised, the Little Flower case was a simple matter of pimp justice. It lacked the cachet of the Harris-O’Malley case, but it pushed Lorraine’s case to the back pages during the dog days of August, and we were grateful. Lorraine’s story would, we knew, resurge when the trial began in early winter, but until then we all welcomed the protective cloak of a private wedding.
From the day Lorraine Harris was brought back from Blue Heron Point, Greg and Mieka had been her support and her comfort. Lorraine was being held at the correctional centre where Jill and I had visited Darren Wolfe, and Mieka and Greg hadn’t missed a visiting day. They had no illusions about the horror of what she had done, but she was family, and for both of them, family was a link that was permanent.
Mieka and Greg’s wedding day was a poignant one. They had learned early and publicly that marriage means caring for one another in good times and bad, and the knowledge had left its mark. As the summer sun poured through the stained-glass window, I leaned forward to look at my daughter. Under the filmy circle of her summer hat, Mieka’s profile was as lovely and delicate as the face on a cameo, but there was sadness there, and there was sadness in the face of the man she loved.
The archdeacon’s voice was solemn as he read from the Book of Alternative Services: “The union of man and woman in heart, body and mind is intended for their mutual comfort and help, that they may know each other with delight and tenderness in acts of love.”
I though
t of the seven children who had come back with us from the island to Blue Heron Point. Seven faces, pale, dead-eyed, not young, not old, not fearing, not hoping. They were in foster homes now, their futures dark and uncertain. And I thought of Bernice Morin, the veteran of the streets who believed in unicorns, and of Theresa Desjarlais standing in the field watching the tundra swans – “if they’re smart and they’re lucky, they’ll make it” – and of Kim Barilko, her expression flickering between longing and contempt as she looked through the glass at wedding dresses that would always be for others, never for her.
“Pray for the blessing of this marriage,” said the archdeacon. Beside me, Hilda McCourt, magnificent in mauve, dropped to the kneeler like a teenager. After a moment, I knelt, too. I prayed for Greg and Mieka, that their marriage would be a good one and that their lives would be happy. And then, as I had every morning that summer, I prayed for the wandering souls.
