Blood is the Sky am-5

by Steve Hamilton

  “Did you get the other one?” he said.

  “Yes,” Maskwa said. “I did.”

  “Alex,” he said, as he stood up slowly. “You’re here.”

  “Yeah, I’m here. I went to Sudbury first.”

  That stopped him for a second. Then he picked up his rifle and brushed off the leaves. “You saw what happened,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “How did you know to go there?”

  “I was in your cabin,” I said. “Leon helped me find the maps you printed out.”

  “Okay.”

  “What was the article about?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “From the Detroit News, ” I said. “Whatever it was, it brought you all the way up here again.”

  “We need to go see how Helen’s doing.”

  “Vinnie, the police are coming.”

  “What?”

  “The OPP are on their way. I called Reynaud.”

  “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to figure out what to do.”

  The three of us went back to the lodge. We passed the dead man, the ruin of his skull and blood and gore on the shed, the mist finally retreating from the dock and the lake as the sun came up. We passed the other dead man. We stepped over the blood and went up the stairs. Helen hadn’t moved. She was still huddled in the corner. High above the fireplace, the moose head was half obliterated, one antler lying on the floor.

  Maskwa went down on his knees and spoke to her in a low voice. “It’s over,” he said. “It’s over.”

  She looked up and scanned our faces, all three of us, one by one. She didn’t look surprised. She was probably incapable of surprise at that point. She was way beyond it.

  “We have to get you out of here,” Vinnie said. “You can’t be here when the police come.”

  “Vinnie,” I said, “what are you talking about?”

  “We’ll explain later, Alex. Right now we’ve got to get her out of here.”

  “Vinnie, you should go with her,” Maskwa said. “Go to my house.”

  “I can’t ask you to stay here,” Vinnie said.

  “If you’re here, they’ll ask you why you came looking for Helen.”

  Vinnie thought about it. “Okay, you’re right.”

  “Do you guys know what you’re doing?” I said.

  “You’ve got to trust us, Alex. Okay? Just trust us for now.”

  I took a long breath. “Okay,” I said. “Get going. Give me your rifle.”

  “When you hit the main road, head west,” Maskwa said. “Give them a chance to come up the service road, then double back. We’ll meet you at my house.”

  “We’ll see you there,” Vinnie said. He threw me his rifle, pausing just long enough to notice my muddy shoes. “What did the doctor tell you, Alex? You gotta keep your feet dry.” Then he and Helen were out the door.

  I waited with Maskwa while Vinnie fired up the truck and took off. It was about a four-minute ride out to the main road, maybe three and a half if you were flying. I wasn’t sure if they’d make it.

  “Maskwa, can you tell me what’s going on now?”

  “It’s Helen’s story,” he said. “She’ll tell you.”

  “Okay, fine. So what do we say when the police get here?”

  “You came looking for Vinnie, and you picked me up to help you.”

  “I talked to Reynaud just before I got here. I didn’t say anything about you being with me.”

  “So you didn’t say anything. It doesn’t mean I wasn’t with you.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “We might be able to sell it.”

  “We split up and searched the place, looking for Helen and Vinnie. Then those men got here. They started shooting at you, so we had to kill them. It was self-defense.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s the story, Alex. We never saw Vinnie, and we never saw Helen. We have no idea where they are.”

  A few minutes later, we heard the police cars coming down to the lodge.

  “As soon as we’re done here, I get all the answers, right?”

  He gave me a tired smile. “You and me both. They still haven’t told me.”

  I stood there looking at him. The police cars got closer.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s showtime.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Maskwa and I spent the next four hours at the lodge, telling our story over and over to several different constables. Staff Sergeant Moreland was there, of course, and as he listened to me go over the whole thing one more time, he had a look on his face like he wished I had never set foot in Ontario. Not that I could blame him. As I watched him standing over the body by the stairs, it occurred to me he was probably near retirement himself. For all I knew, he and DeMers had been making plans to go fishing together when they had both hung it up. Now DeMers was dead. DeMers and Gannon and Tom LeBlanc and four men from Detroit were dead, and now there were two more.

  I saw Boxer Face and Suntan standing there for a moment, looking down at the other body, the one by the shed, and I saw a couple other constables who had kept guard over me in the medical center. The one person I didn’t see was Natalie Reynaud. When I asked the sergeant where she was, he told me she was back at the detachment and left it at that. Then he told me to go home and to wait by my phone in case he needed me for more questions. Aside from that, he didn’t want to ever see me or hear from me again.

  When we were finally in my truck, I took my last look at the lodge and then turned the ignition. “Come on, Maskwa,” I said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  I turned the truck around and headed out the gravel road. A minute later, we passed the sedan, its front wheels off the road.

  “This wasn’t the best way to do this,” I said.

  Maskwa looked over at me. “What do you mean?”

  “Setting the trap so far from the lodge. You gave them a chance to regroup.”

  He looked back out the window. “It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. We were going to take Helen to the lodge, get her settled in there, and then come back out. Those guys would have never made it out of the car.”

  “Did they get here too soon?”

  He shrugged. “Vinnie misjudged how much of a lead we had.”

  “Why not just leave her at your house?”

  “She wouldn’t let us do that.”

  “I wouldn’t have given her the choice.”

  “You weren’t there, Alex.”

  I shook my head and kept driving. We hit the main highway, took a left, and headed east, toward the reserve.

  “You saw what they did to Helen’s friends,” Maskwa said. “I didn’t see it myself, you’ve got to understand that. Vinnie just told me about it. But you were there in the house.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they really burn them alive?”

  I hesitated as the scene came back to me. “It looked like they were still alive, yes.”

  “They would have done the same to Helen. They were coming for her. We weren’t going to let her out of our sight.”

  “So why did Vinnie come up here?” I said. “And why did he come alone?”

  “He told me he didn’t want to drag you up here again.”

  I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. “Yeah, he’ll hear about that one later.”

  “Vinnie called me,” he said. “He was driving right by the reserve. It was a spur of the moment thing.”

  That hit me in the gut. Spur of the moment or not, when Vinnie needed help, he chose one of his own people again. Not me.

  Maskwa seemed to pick up on it. “It was too late to call you,” he said. “He needed help and I was right here.”

  I didn’t say anything. I kept driving. I turned onto the road to Calstock, passing the sawmill and the power plant, then the spot in the woods where we had found the Suburban. The crime scene tape was gone now. There was no trace of what had happened here.

  We drove past the sign welcoming us to the Constance Lake
Reserve. The lake appeared on our left, and then the road to Maskwa’s house. Vinnie’s truck was parked outside.

  When we pulled in, Guy and his mother both came out of their house next door. It was a cold and bitter day and they were walking with their heads down, Guy’s mother in a housecoat with her arms wrapped around her chest, and Guy in his baseball jacket. They joined us in Maskwa’s living room, all six of us in that one small room. Maskwa threw some more wood into his stove.

  “How did it go?” Vinnie asked. He was sitting in the back corner, farthest away from the fire. Helen was on the couch, watching the fire through the glass door on the stove.

  “We got through it,” I said. “They want to know where you and Helen are.”

  “I imagine.”

  “We told them we didn’t know.”

  “Thank you.”

  I was just about to ask when the explanations would begin, but then I found a measure of patience for the first time in my life. I kept my mouth shut and sat down.

  Maskwa made coffee, and the rest of us sat there in silence. Finally, Vinnie took out a folded piece of paper from his pocket and gave it to me. Helen didn’t look at me. She didn’t move.

  I unfolded the paper and read it. It was a reprint from the Detroit News, dated January 21, 1985. The headline read “Death Toll in Hotel Fire Grows to 27.”

  I glanced up at Helen. She had her hands clasped tight together in her lap.

  The picture. It showed the burned-out remains of a building, a hotel on Warren Avenue, near Wayne State University. It was a grainy black-and-white photo, made even grainier in the reprint. It looked like something from a hundred years ago.

  The story itself started out with two more people dying at the hospital, plus another person who had not been included in the initial count. Most of the dead were Canadians. A junior high school class had come down from Sudbury to take part in a choral concert at the college. Nineteen of the dead were students.

  I looked up at Helen again. She kept staring at the fire. Something came to me then, something she had said to me at the lodge.

  No kids. None of them had kids. Helen, Hank, Ron, and Millie-it was what they all had in common. The strange gloom that was hanging over the lodge when we got there-it occurred to me now that it wasn’t just because they were closing down the business. There was a much bigger reason.

  I went back to the article. The fire had started next door, in a dry cleaner’s. It had spread into the hotel. There was some question about the sprinkler system in the old hotel, and the fire exits. An investigation was underway.

  I looked at the date on the article again. I thought back to January of 1985. That was right in the middle of my lost year, the year after my partner and I were gunned down in that apartment building on Woodward, the year after my marriage ended and I left the police force. I remembered the fire, but only vaguely. It was just something on the front page of the newspaper.

  The last paragraph was a long list, each name followed by an age and a home town. I scanned through the names. I found Stephanie Gannon, 13, Sudbury. I found Melissa St. Jean, 13, Sudbury. I found Brett Trembley, 13, Sudbury, and Barry Trembley, 13, Sudbury.

  This time when I looked up at Helen she cleared her throat and spoke. “Now you know,” she said. She didn’t look at me.

  Maskwa handed me a hot cup of coffee. He sat down next to Guy’s mother. Guy was sitting on the floor next to Vinnie. They were all watching the flames in the wood stove.

  “I wasn’t there,” she said. “Hank wasn’t there. Ron and Millie weren’t there. The kids wanted to go by themselves. Just their friends and a couple of chaperones. They were so excited.”

  She looked down at the cup in her hands. She didn’t drink from it.

  “Melissa and Stephanie were best friends. They were in that room together. They were planning on going to college together. They were going to be bridesmaids for each other.”

  She swallowed hard.

  “At least they were together when they died,” she said. “They had that much.”

  There was silence in the room for a while.

  “They say the smoke gets you first,” she finally said. “They say you never feel the fire itself. You don’t even wake up. But it started at midnight. That’s the thing. In a hotel room by themselves for the first time, there’s no way those two kids would have been sleeping at midnight.”

  A single tear ran down her cheek.

  “Afterward, we’d all get together once a week. All the parents. Sort of like a support group. We’d try to help each other. After about a year, people started to drop out of the group. It was time to move on, they said. It was time to stop dwelling on it. That’s what one woman said to me. It’s not healthy, she said. You’ve got to let go.”

  Another long silence. The wood crackled in the stove.

  “She had another child. That’s why she said that. She had somebody else. We didn’t. We had nobody. Maybe it was unhealthy, holding on to each other like that. All these years. But we were all we had. Nobody else could understand. I couldn’t be with somebody else, somebody who didn’t know how it felt. So we stayed together.”

  She wiped her nose with her hand.

  “Claude tried to look after us,” she said. It took me a second to realize who she was talking about now. “As much as he was grieving himself, losing his daughter, I think he felt responsible for us.”

  Claude. I looked back down at the article, scanned the list of names. I didn’t see anyone named DeMers.

  “Her name was Olivia Markel,” Helen said. “That was her married name. She was the music teacher.”

  I found the name. Olivia Markel, 27, Sudbury.

  “Claude found out about the investigation,” she said. “He had a friend, a detective down in Detroit.”

  I skimmed through the article again. “The hotel,” I said. “The sprinklers and the fire exits.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “No?”

  “The dry cleaner’s next door,” she said. “They were trying to put an arson case together. I guess it’s a hard thing to do. Especially a place like that, with all the chemicals… It’s not enough to prove that it was set intentionally. You have to prove that the owners did it themselves, or paid somebody else to do it.”

  “The owners-”

  “Red Albright. And his little gang. There were five of them. They owned a lot of businesses back then. The dry cleaner’s wasn’t doing so well, so they burned it down. That’s what happened. The police couldn’t prove it. But that’s what happened.”

  “I’m not getting some of this,” I said. “I’m sorry. How did they get up here, all these years later?”

  She shook her head. “Claude shouldn’t have told us about the investigation. I know he regretted it ever since. The way it just kept eating at us… Especially Hank. It was driving him crazy. He was going to go after them himself, he said. For a while, it was all he ever thought about. When we all bought the lodge together, he used to sit there by the fireplace… This was the fireplace you saw, the one he never let anybody build a fire in.”

  I saw the empty fireplace in my mind. I heard the moaning sound it made when the wind rushed over the chimney.

  “He’d sit there,” she said, “and try to come up with the best way to get those men, every one of them. He knew he could find them. He knew he could go down there and ring their doorbells and see their faces. It was just… what to do next. I thought I finally convinced him, he’d just ruin his life, what was left of it. Or whatever life we might be able to have together. I thought he was getting over it. Finally, I thought maybe he had let it go. And then they called us, just like that. Albright himself. This man. This voice on the phone. Back when our phone was working. He called us.”

  “Of all the places to go hunting in Canada,” I said, “they called you?”

  “They got tired of hunting deer and they wanted to try something bigger. They heard there were some go
od moose lakes up here, and there aren’t that many lodges left. Ours just happened to be the one they chose. After all these years, just when I thought Hank was getting to be himself again… He told me it was just a twist of fate. But that maybe it was supposed to work out that way. Like God sent them up here. He actually said that. Like we were finally being given the chance to see the men who killed our children.”

  I knew it wasn’t that simple. They may have burned down their business, whether they had been charged for it or not. The fire spread into the hotel, which may or may not have been up to fire codes. It was a whole chain of events that might have turned out a hundred different ways. But I wasn’t going to say that to her.

  “I know what you must be thinking. I know how it sounds. But you can’t understand what it feels like until it happens to you. I’d have dreams about my daughter. About the fire. I couldn’t get to her.”

  Her voice was ragged now.

  “I can’t make you understand,” she said. “The dreams-”

  We heard the rumble of a car passing by outside. The sound got farther and farther away, and then it was quiet again.

  “When those men got here, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was afraid to even look at them. But Hank, my God, he was out there shaking their hands, looking each one of them in the eyes. If I had done that-”

  She stopped. She looked back at Vinnie.

  “If I had done that, I might have seen your brother. I might have known he wasn’t one of them. I might have seen that he didn’t belong.”

  Vinnie didn’t say anything. The light from the fire was reflected in his eyes.

  Five men. That’s all Hank had seen. Albright and his business associates.

  Five men.

  “Hank flew them out to Lake Agawaatese. It’s the farthest away. There aren’t even many moose up there. Just bears.”

  She kept looking at Vinnie.

  “I didn’t know, Vinnie.” She said it like she was still trying to convince him. “I didn’t know what he was going to do.”

  “You knew he was going to kill them,” Vinnie said.