Raw Bone

by Scott Thornley

  “Based on what?” Wallace said.

  “A hunch.”

  “Christ, MacNeice, you know judges don’t like hunches. Can you give me anything better?”

  “An educated guess.”

  Wallace sighed. “Leave it with me. There’s a surveillance team I can redirect. They’ll be there in five minutes or so. Brief them when they arrive.”

  MacNeice opened his CD wallet and took out Thelonious Monk. He slid Solo Monk into the CD player and, as he waited, let the light-fingered playing carry his thoughts down to the water and over to the shallow inlet across Dundurn Bay. The striding piano stripped away a myriad of concerns and allowed him to focus on the possibility of Byrne as a killer. It didn’t work. Byrne didn’t have the strength to crush the girl’s neck, let alone lift her and the heavy anchor over the side of a shallow draft boat. An aluminum or cedar strip runabout would have been unsteady, too, like trying to throw her out of a canoe. And, as far as a second man to help him went, he’d have had to be younger than those he’d seen at the bar. They were doing all they could just to lift a pint of beer.

  A rusted-out blue Ford Windstar approached slowly from the south. The driver flashed the headlights once before turning onto the side street. He did a slow U-turn before parking comfortably between two driveways, one home to a tired old Chrysler and the other, a worn-out Lincoln with one of its rear wheel hubs rusted and resting on a jack, within sight of the BTB entrance and side door. MacNeice drove around the block and came to a stop behind the van. When the driver emerged, he was wearing a black wool watch cap, blue jeans, cross-trainers and a grey hoodie under a beat-up Harley-Davidson leather vest. He slid into the passenger seat—Constable Edward Radnicki.

  MacNeice gave him a detailed description of Byrne: fifty years old, give or take, five foot seven, mousy brown hair, brown eyes, approximately 130 pounds, skinny, heavy smoker, wearing a grey blazer, baggy denim jeans. “He lives a few blocks up Bay,” MacNeice said, handing him a note with Byrne’s name and address. “I want him watched until a warrant is served tomorrow morning. And, taking into account the clientele you can imagine frequenting the BTB, I’d like a report on anyone that looks out of the ordinary.”

  “No problem.” Radnicki jogged back to his vehicle.

  Back at Division, he found a message from Wallace that the necessary paperwork would be on MacNeice’s desk before morning.

  As he sat in his usual spot at the end of Marcello’s bar, it wasn’t to the body or the Block and Tackle Bar or William Byrne’s shaky performance that MacNeice’s thoughts turned. What came back was the moment in Cootes when the sun broke through and all the black tree trunks turned to zinc; even the smallest branches glistened silver-gold. It was early March and entirely possible that he wouldn’t see precisely that quality of light for another year. When it had happened, the sparrows around him paused and fluffed their feathers as if they’d noticed too.

  He recalled looking back at the bay through the rain as he and Aziz had driven away. Like tiny islands, the remnants of ice that had imprisoned the body lay forlorn, left to drift and dissolve in the brown water. The landscape forgets over time; the bay had already forgotten. MacNeice wouldn’t. The morning, the ice, the hand and buttock, the once-lovely, near-frozen woman had all found their way to the stack of shadows where they’d be waiting for him. While the zinc trees and the happy sparrows were no match for those shadows, he’d cling to them for a time.

  His mind drifted back to when he was twelve or so, taking Silver, his golden retriever, into the birch, spruce and pine forest for the first time, climbing over the pink and quartz-veined bedrock with its crispy lichen and blueberry bushes—the latter picked over by his mother or by black bears—to go skinny-dipping on the other side of the Georgian Bay island labelled D-25 by the government bureaucrats that had sold northern properties to the public in the 1950s.

  The secret beach he’d found was out of sight and earshot of the newly acquired rustic family cottage on the adjacent D-24, though if a beach required sand, there was none, just the mucky bottom of leaves and vegetation blown in from Georgian Bay.

  He’d stripped off, dumping his T-shirt and shorts on top of his underwear, socks and runners, and stepped slowly into the water, trying not to disturb the bottom. Not because he was squeamish, but so he could look for the schools of minnows that would dart about him like copper slivers.

  He wasn’t called Mac yet. That nickname was reserved for his father. The boy was known by his first name, Iain, which he hated, in part because most people couldn’t spell it.

  As he was floating on his back, a great blue heron flew low overhead to land nearby. Startled to see the boy, it flapped furiously to gain altitude, its shoulders rotating backwards, then it veered to the right and down the inlet. Feeling the wind from the wings wash over him, he felt more alive than he ever had before. The great bird’s belly feathers had been only three or four feet above him, its long legs, feet and talons thrust down toward him, like brakes, before tucking up as it escaped.

  He’d stood up, elated, straining to catch sight of the bird, but it had flown off in search of a solitary place to spear fish. He’d climbed out of the water, walked past his clothes and into the forest. Lying down on a thick bed of star moss that blanketed a gulley between two granite shoulders, he’d put his hands behind his head and looked up at the canopy. He’d inhaled deeply, the smells foreign to his home in Dundurn, the strongest of which were pine and spruce. But there were others he couldn’t name or describe, other than to say they smelled sweet and wet. The boy had made himself a quiet promise that MacNeice realized he’d never kept: to spend as much time as it took to record everything he had smelled on that August afternoon.

  The sun fell in fragmented glints as the water dried, droplet by droplet, on his skin. Silver came bounding up from the water, shaking himself and showering the flinching boy before lying down next to him to chew on a fallen branch.

  He’d listened to the calls of grey gulls passing overhead, to the chatter of a red squirrel somewhere nearby, to Silver’s happy groans as he munched on the stick, and slowly his breathing relaxed and he fell asleep.

  Over the rest of that summer, he’d gone back to his beach, hoping the heron would return, and though he would see many herons, none ever again came so close.

  The reverie led him directly to the last time he’d visited his secret beach, with Kate. They’d skinny-dipped and then made love on the bed of star moss. The sudden thought of his late wife was enough to break the reverie. MacNeice was back at the bar at Marcello’s with the remains of pesto pasta in front of him, and visions of a woman frozen in the ice. He shoved the plate aside and picked up Montaigne’s Essays, a book of Kate’s he’d taken off the shelf before coming to dinner. She’d read it twice in the two years before she died. Perhaps that was why it was something he’d always found an excuse not to read.

  “Detective MacNeice?”

  MacNeice looked up at a woman with black hair and black-framed glasses that encouraged you to focus on her deep brown eyes.

  “I am.” He glanced at his book, closing it with an index finger to mark the page.

  “I thought so.” She sat down on the stool beside him, holding up her empty wineglass to signal Marcello.

  She was wearing a dark blue suit and a satin blouse the colour of butter. It was open at the neck, where a pearl teardrop hung on a fine chain. Her fingers were long and slender—no rings—and the natural nail polish looked fresh, driving his thoughts back to the fingernails of the dead woman.

  “Samantha Stewart—everybody calls me Sam.” She looked at him expectantly, and when he didn’t react, she said, “You were my first interview out of journalism school. You had arrested a young man suspected of killing his girlfriend and their baby.”

  He recalled the case. The man’s name was Anthony Billingsworth—angry Tony. His father took the stand on his behalf and kept repeating, “Anthony’s a good son, Anthony’s a good son.” But the more he said i
t, the less it appeared that even he believed it. Tony had crushed his girlfriend’s skull with a baseball bat and drowned his three-month-old baby in a kitchen sink full of dirty dishes. Though he finally confessed, he never explained why he did it.

  The boy and his dog were well and truly gone.

  “I remember the case, but I’m sorry, I don’t …”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to. Your wife had died only a month or two before we met, then I left for a job at the Chicago Sun-Times.”

  “Ah, and now?”

  “I’ve moved back home and I’m freelancing. Newspapers have hit hard times.” Marcello put down a glass of white wine in front of her and, turning to MacNeice, said, “Grappa?”

  MacNeice nodded. “You could freelance anywhere. Why come back to Dundurn?”

  “Boy, you still cut to the chase.” She smiled at him briefly. “It’s cheaper and safer than Chicago.”

  “That’s true.”

  She retreated to the Billingsworth case. She reminded him that he’d noticed something about the way Tony looked whenever he spoke about his girlfriend.

  And he had: angry Tony was trying to convince everyone that he was desperate to find the killer because he’d failed to protect his family. MacNeice finished his grappa. “Once, Tony said almost in passing that the baby wasn’t his—though that was not in doubt. He was insanely jealous and convinced himself that he wasn’t the father. After he was convicted, he killed himself in prison a year later by shoving toilet paper down his throat and up his nostrils.”

  “I didn’t know that was possible.”

  MacNeice pushed the glass away. “It is if you’re determined. He was determined.” An awkward silence descended and MacNeice signalled for the check.

  All at once, Sam said, “So I was engaged, the relationship went sour, my dad had a heart attack back here and I decided it was time to come home.” She’d kept her eyes on the bar, but now she said, “You’re studying me.” And he was.

  “Sorry.”

  “Well … ?”

  “You mean, what conclusions am I drawing?”

  She nodded, but there was no trace of a smile.

  “I’d just wondered why you weren’t telling me why you really moved home. Now I know.”

  Back at his stone cottage, MacNeice poured himself another short grappa, then went to stand at the window. Outside, the forest was still stuck in winter. The remaining mounds of snow were hugging the tree trunks—iridescent blue in the deep twilight. His thoughts returned to the encounter at Marcello’s. Since Kate had died, he’d had thousands of conversations with women—often, but not always, through police work. The closest he’d come to feeling attraction had been with Fiza and that had very nearly spun out of control.

  He chuckled briefly, looking out at the web of branches caught in the light spill from his window, surprised that Samantha Stewart occupied his thoughts. He emptied the glass, tucked it into the dishwasher, out of sight, and went to bed. His thoughts drifted, never landing—the benefit of grappa—and he sank into sleep.

  Chapter 4

  What are you pecking at in my garden?

  “To be honest, I have no idea. Seeds, I think,” the bird said under its breath.

  I’ve never seen you here before. I know you see me, as I see you—I think I made you nervous but I didn’t mean to.

  “Nervous? No, you don’t make me nervous.”

  Sleek, chimney-smoke grey, the size of a robin—minus the orange pot-belly—a narrow black beak; engineered for speed, and yet here you are pecking away in my garden. Possibly you recognize, in that birdbrain of yours, a kindred spirit.

  He picked up Birds of North America and found the entry for gray catbird: plain dark grey with a black cap and a long, black tail, often cocked, Dumetella carolinensis.

  The book says you’re a singer, a mimic thrush from the family Mimidae.

  “You look sad,” the catbird said. “There’s something you hang on to, or can’t let go of.”

  If I were ever to wonder about the moment when it all came unstuck, it might be when I started talking to a bird.

  “I know. It’s not easy for me either.” The catbird tilted its head and hopped under a bush. When it came back, it turned in his direction. “If I could lick my lips, I would. A young grub is the sweetest.”

  I’m sure.

  “But, back to you: something has caved inside of you. What was it?” The catbird suddenly appeared on the top of the chair across from him. It stretched its head toward him and hopped onto the table, stopping beside the grappa bottle. “Ah, I see.”

  What do you see?

  “This.” It turned its head toward the bottle. “Instead of dulling the pain, it drops the veil and turns you inside out.”

  Would you like to try some?

  “Just a drop.”

  He poured a little from his glass onto the white metal table. The catbird hopped close. Bending forward, it tilted its head to look closely at the liquid.

  “It’s not water.”

  No.

  “It smells strong.” The catbird snapped its head down to the grappa, tapping the tiny puddle, hitting the metal surface, then swiftly lifting its head and shaking it furiously before fluttering its wings.

  More?

  “Absolutely not.”

  Tell me about yourself, your life. I’ve always wondered about a bird’s life.

  “You have?” The bird lifted a wing, nipping and grooming the wingpit.

  Always. As a kid, I thought if I could come back, you know, after I died, it would be great to come back as a raven.

  “Smart birds, but nasty bastards—you can’t trust them.” The catbird fluffed its wings before setting down on the surface, letting the metal cool its belly.

  Tell me about flying.

  “Aw, now you’ve hit the one thing I really love to do, especially on a windy day like today.” The catbird swayed as it spoke. “You soar and glide, climb and dive with such ease.”

  I’d love to feel that.

  “You could … any time.” The bird tilted its head at the empty shot glass. “But you need to leave sorrow on the ground. Have you ever seen a bird, a swallow or even those filthy gulls, flying sorrowfully?”

  No.

  “It’s not possible. Joy and sorrow don’t fly together. You stink of sorrow. You’re sinking into yourself.”

  Really?

  “But if you trust me, I’ll show you how.” The bird flew low to the side of the stone cottage, where it landed on a branch and waited. “Coming?”

  I’m coming, I’m coming.

  He got up from the chair and realized he was unsteady. He had to hold on to the table for a moment, then he walked over to the bird.

  The catbird hopped onto his shoulder. “Okay, out to the driveway. It’ll be easier if we go up the mountain first to catch the draft.”

  Are you sure I can do this?

  “You will fly away from sorrow right now. I don’t care what happened, I don’t care how long you’ve been suffering—life is too short to spend it feeling sorry for yourself.”

  I don’t think of it like that.

  “No, you think sacrificing your happiness is noble, an answer to loss or to the fact you were incapable of stopping loss from happening. You know what the answer to loss is?”

  No.

  “Fucking flying. Flying so high and fast, so wildly, so this way and that,” the catbird did a shimmy with its shoulders, digging needlelike talons into his shoulder, “so free that you laugh out loud with the joy of it.”

  Tell me what I have to do. And I didn’t know birds could swear.

  “Right … but you accept that I speak English. Okay, lean forward and lift your legs.”

  I’ll fall on my face.

  “If you say so. I say you’ll fly and we’ll sail up across this road, then down the mountain and back again. Think about it: You’re already having a conversation with a bird, so how much harm could there be in trying?”

  Leaning for
ward, he lifted one leg, then the other, and to his surprise he didn’t fall. He didn’t fly exactly; he was just bobbing a few feet in the air like a tethered balloon. The catbird was laughing hard, hovering just above his shoulder. Its eye—a glossy black bead of polished granite—reflected the trees and sky.

  “Technically, we’re not flying yet. And actually, what we’re doing is harder, so let’s go.”

  Do I flap my wings—my arms, I mean?

  “You’re not doing that now, so no. You can use them to change direction, but you don’t have to work at it. Trust me, half of flying is simply believing you can.”

  But you’re a bird, he thought, and then he lifted higher and moved effortlessly forward. As the bird sheered to the right, gliding over the trees and sliding down the mountain, he followed—fast. He started to laugh and was soon laughing so hard the tears were streaming from his eyes. Ahead of him, the catbird was laughing too. He was surprised at how lush the forest was and how, from this height, he could see the breezes sweeping off the mountain, making the treetops dance. The bird shifted its shoulders and in a second was flying just to the left of his face. It kept looking over at him; he kept looking back.

  “You see, you’re flying. You know what else? Your eyes are bright, that sadness that filled them is gone, your cheeks are rosy and when you’re not laughing, you’re smiling. This is what being alive is. Before this, you were breathing, but I wouldn’t have said you were alive. It’s important to know the difference.”

  I do! I do.

  The catbird had disappeared; the lesson was over.

  He found himself cloud high, but then the earth appeared to be reeling him in like an exhausted trout. He raised his knees and pushed out, hoping that would change his direction, but he was dropping faster now. He may as well have been falling from a tall building. Below him, people were pointing upward and screaming; those closest to the monument started running, trying to get clear of the human missile before it smashed into them or splashed into the stone.