Meet John Doe
The blinds in Martin’s office were drawn, the desk lamps pointed down in little penumbras of shade and brightness, as though he’d a developed a light sensitivity. Dan waited for an explanation, though none was forthcoming. He turned down the offer of water and proceeded to describe his break-up with Bill, weaving in strands of the conversation with Donny in which he’d nearly ended their friendship.
As always, he was leery of how much to tell Martin. Was it just paranoia that whispered in his ear and said Martin might label him a psychopath or a menace to society? As Dan’s psychiatrist, he’d been granted the authority to judge Dan’s ability to function at his work. Maybe that extended to other areas in his life, like his suitability as a father. He imagined Martin standing at the gates of Auschwitz, pointing to various doorways: a set of twins directed to the left for experimentation, others to the right for a more succinct end. Though maybe that wasn’t fair. Perhaps Martin wasn’t the monster Dan believed him to be, but he wasn’t willing to take the chance. That he exhibited not a single sign of having emotions while isolating and observing emotions in others made him suspect. It was people like Martin who inspired books like Blade Runner.
Dan brought up his concern for Bill, explaining how he’d struggled to understand what Bill was going through being in love with his best friend while attempting to maintain a relationship with Dan. He thought Martin might award him a gold star for his efforts, as he had when he tried to get Dan to understand Ralph’s needs.
For once, Martin didn’t ask Dan how he felt about the situation. Instead, he said, “That’s a lot of responsibility you place on your shoulders — anticipating other people’s needs as well as your reaction to them. Are you trying to be perfect?”
Hardly, thought Dan. No one going for a good behaviour award would have done what I did afterwards. “No, I’m far from perfect. I have no illusions there. I bashed in a filing cabinet, remember.”
Martin scribbled something in his book. Was he marking the reference to the incident as mocking or simply noting that Dan had a sense of humour about it? He looked up. “Do you think you might be trying to make up for your perceived lack of perfection?”
“How is that?”
“You said Bill was particularly hard to please, ergo, you were never able to function to his satisfaction. You probably saw yourself as imperfect in Bill’s eyes….”
Dan interrupted. “I think Bill saw everyone as imperfect in Bill’s eyes. I never thought that was my fault.”
Martin smiled his patient smile, the one he wore when he wanted to coax Dan toward a conclusion of some sort. “Was there another relationship in your past where you tried to please a man who couldn’t or wouldn’t be pleased by anything you did?”
“I tried to make my father love me.”
“But you failed, didn’t you?”
“Miserably.”
“Because — as far as you believe — your father never loved you.”
Dan nodded.
“But you won’t accept that perhaps your father was incapable of love. You prefer to take on the responsibility for his lack of affection toward you.”
“Maybe. Does it matter now?”
Martin’s pencil poised over the pad. “It might help if you saw that Bill is another version of your father: a man impossible to please.”
Dan looked at the clock — twenty-five minutes left — then glanced at the framed diploma in psychiatry awarded to Martin Sanger. Googling his therapist in the early days of their sessions, along with a list of publication titles to his credit, Dan had come across the German translation for Martin’s last name: pincer. He envisioned a giant set of pliers tugging at the neurons in his brain. “Yes, I can see the connection,” he said.
Martin leaned forward. “Do you think that might be why you get angry with Ralph when he messes the floor or why you dent filing cabinets with your fists when something goes wrong at work? Is that why you want to cut off your closest friend when he tells you the truth about yourself? You want everyone around you to be perfect, because otherwise you feel you can’t love them.”
With a chill, Dan remembered his son’s words in the park: I’m just afraid that one day I’ll piss you off and you’ll stop loving me, too.
Martin looked pleased, as though he’d just inserted the last tile in a ten-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, completing the image of a damaged man unable to express love. Dan wouldn’t give him that satisfaction.
“Is that what you think, Martin?”
Martin’s eye blinked, a lizard sunning itself on a rock. “I’m asking you.”
Dan swallowed. “I don’t have an opinion,” he lied.
He wanted to say, Don’t think you know me, to this grotesque impersonation of a man bent over his notepad beneath his Mondrian reproduction. Wasn’t it Mondrian who despised nature? Hated trees?
Dan wondered about the others who sat in this chair revealing or hiding themselves from this man and his bloodless, probing intellect — a collection of damaged beings going through the motions of expressing their desires and fears, before letting themselves out the big doors to stand deflated in the hallway beside the elevator that never came. Before returning to the other world — the real world — where theories did nothing to piece together the shattered bits of themselves. The depressed, the despairing, and the broken: women whose spouses beat them, adult children of alcoholics who went through life feeling unworthy and unloved, the emotionally distraught. How did sitting here for this hour do anything to help? When they left, their time up, did they leave a residue of pain and disappointment, an invisible trail leading all the way from this chair down the hall? Did any of them think it a virtue to sit and suffer over all this? Perhaps Martin gave out badges after it was all over, and they’d divulged all there was to divulge. A little something to say, “I suffered.” Maybe, Dan thought, he could ask for a bumper sticker instead. What would Martin scribble in his little binder if he said that?
In the daytime, Bill had begun to revert to a bad memory, a sour taste on the tongue. Yet each morning on awakening, Dan’s first thoughts were of loss. He found it difficult to drag himself out of bed and suspected he was fighting a lingering depression over the split. He knew nothing would help get him through it but time — preferably time spent alone.
Ked was long past needing Dan’s help to get ready for school. Dan found the signs of his son’s passing each morning: the dog leash hung over the banister, a cereal bowl and spoon washed and left in the dish rack, the newspaper dropped on the side table in the hall. These were Ked’s morning footprints. For such a big kid, he took up relatively little space.
The days went by in a whirl of strategy meetings and negotiations with despairing or difficult clients. Dan hadn’t expected to hear from either Bill or Thom, so he was surprised to find on his desk an application bearing the name Killingworth. Not Lucille, Thom, or Ted, but Craig. Someone wanted him to make an inquiry into the disappearance of Lucille Killingworth’s missing husband.
The name of a solicitor was prominent, but there was no client named, nothing to say who’d requested the search. Dan flipped through the file. Was this Lucille Killingworth’s way of getting the better of him, by hiring him publicly after he’d turned her down privately? Could she be that stubborn or foolish to think he could be bought? If so, he was happy to show her otherwise.
He read over the letter — not yellow parchment this time — and pressed the intercom. His boss came on the line. Ed Burch was a straight-talking, no-nonsense retired cop who never took no for an answer. “What are the chances?” That’s all Ed ever asked. And then you were off on your own. He’d been the first to congratulate Dan for becoming a single gay dad. To Ed, the word “limitation” didn’t exist.
“It came through a solicitor,” was Ed’s reply. “That’s all I can tell you. Why?”
“I know these people,” Dan said. “I don’t like them. I don’t want to take this one on.”
“It has your
name on it, Danny. The client specifically asked for you.”
“Well, tell them I’m not avail —”
His boss cut him off. “I can’t do that. You start things in motion and I’ll look into it once you’ve got it going. If I can, I’ll put someone else on it then.”
“And if not?”
“If not, we’ll see.”
Dan knew his options were limited. He was still doing penance for denting the filing cabinet. He felt like a schoolboy who’d been caught writing naughty words on the blackboard. He’d have to keep his fingers clean until someone else did something worse and his little indiscretion faded from memory.
He buzzed Sally, who came in wearing a sky blue sundress, orange loafers, and a violet kerchief. Not colourless. She stood waiting for orders. Dan wasn’t sure where to start. Most of his cases involved searches for people who’d disappeared within recent memory. Cases where he could start by asking the client about the last time they’d seen the misper. What did anyone expect him to find after more than twenty years?
“Check with the Picton OPP. They should still have the original files. You can tell Detective Constable Peter Saylor I requested this.”
Sally was scribbling on her pad.
“Also check with Toronto police. Tell them I want to look at their John Doe files from the time. Canada-wide. Especially anything that’s not online. You can give them the specs, but tell them not to narrow things down too far. They can leave that to me. I’m sure the report must have been filed in both places, even if he disappeared in Prince Edward County.”
Sally went off, pen in hand, a rainbow in motion, leaving his door open.
Two days later he had Saylor’s transcript of the original missing persons report on Craig Killingworth on his desk. The photograph showed an attractive man in his late thirties or early forties: curly brown hair, a strong jaw, and intelligent eyes with a serious set. The kind of man you wouldn’t hesitate to ask directions of or maybe even buy a used car from, if the price was right. A charmer. Thom had obviously inherited his good looks from both sides of the family.
Some of the facts about the case seemed unremarkable; others merited a second look. Dan was intrigued to learn that at the time of his disappearance Lucille Killingworth had had a restraining order imposed against her husband for assault and uttering a death threat. On her testimony, Killingworth had been suspended from his job as principal of a local high school after spending a night in jail. He’d also been ordered not to make contact with his sons on the grounds that he posed a potential threat to his boys. He’d disappeared before the case made it to court.
It was a heady read. The file gave an address in nearby Bloomfield, ten minutes out of Picton, as Craig Killingworth’s last known residence. He’d lived there for two months estranged from his family until his disappearance, the exact day of which was unclear. It had eventually been narrowed down to the weekend of November 1–2, right after his appearance on the Friday at the Picton Courthouse when a date had been set for his trial. At that hearing, Killingworth tried unsuccessfully to have visiting rights to his sons reinstated. On his wife’s testimony, the court upheld the original order.
The report compiled by Picton OPP in the weeks following his disappearance created a portrait of a methodical man. All his bills had been paid, including his rent in advance, for the next two months. His pre-furnished residence had been orderly and recently cleaned. The bed was made, dishes washed, and an empty travel case tucked behind a door.
Apart from a photograph of his sons and a handful of books stacked carefully on a shelf, there’d been few personal items. There were no signs of trouble or a break-in. The only thing missing was a bicycle; it had disappeared the same weekend Killingworth was believed to have vanished. The report confirmed that a number of locals had seen him cycling on the highway between Bloomfield and Picton on several occasions in the weeks prior to his disappearance.
Dan wondered why a wealthy man would be riding a bicycle. He read on. The Glenora ferryboat captain, Terry Piers, stated that Craig Killingworth had made the trip over to Adolphustown on his bicycle on the afternoon of Saturday, November 1. He hadn’t returned. Because of the sighting, and the court restriction against seeing his family, the report concluded that Craig Killingworth had headed past Adolphustown and cycled east to Kingston. Whether he’d disappeared by choice or by chance was anybody’s guess.
Several additional sightings of Craig Killingworth were made in the weeks and months following his disappearance. None turned up any substantial leads. A month later, a second report looked briefly into the suggestion that Killingworth’s disappearance might have been the result of foul play. Mention was made of a gardener employed at the Killingworth home a few months before Killingworth’s disappearance, not long before charges were laid against him by his wife. According to the report, Craig Killingworth had fired the gardener on suspicion of theft. An anonymous writer suggested in bold script that Killingworth’s disappearance might have been the result of an act of revenge by the gardener. A subsequent note, appended in a different hand, argued that Killingworth had more likely given up on his efforts to clear his reputation, abandoning home and family to start over elsewhere.
A statement by family members included a plea by Craig’s sister, Clare, that he get in touch with his family, as well as a tersely worded comment from fifteen-year-old Theodore Killingworth to the effect that his father was “a liar.” The table of contents listed a third document noted only as M.H. Dan looked through all the papers, but it seemed to have gone missing or never to have made it into the larger file. Nor was there anything to suggest who or what M.H. might be.
He buzzed Sally. She entered clutching a large manila envelope. Dan pointed at the paragraph mentioning the fired gardener.
“Find a name for that person — that’s who I want to talk to.”
Sally squinted at the file and took note of the reference.
“And this one here.” He pointed at the name of the ferryboat captain. “See if you can locate either of them.”
“Will do. Now my turn,” she said, tapping the thick envelope in her arms. “Here are the John Does from that time.” She dropped it on his desk and smiled. “Have fun.”
The Doe files were the saddest, most dismal collection of human relics Dan could ever have imagined. If there was anything more degrading than to end up strangled in an industrial park, stabbed beneath a bridge or fished from a river wearing concrete shoes, it was to find that no one was interested in claiming your remains or learning who you’d been. Not one thing in your life stood out enough for anyone to want to trace your steps and reconnect you with your past, with the people who had given birth to you, reared and loved you. Not one.
Dan was familiar enough with the Doe files. What struck him was how generic most of the facial reconstructions were or how unlikely it was that anyone, even those who’d known the dead person intimately, might actually find a resemblance between the faces drawn, sculpted and recreated by computers, or sense a sliver of recognition between these humanoid images and the people they were supposed to represent. On the other hand, a few were so sharply portrayed and with so much circumstantial evidence noted — rare blood types, unusual scars, and dental records, even handmade clothing — it seemed improbable that they hadn’t been recognized: the buck-toothed boy with a bowl-shaped haircut found wearing a cap available from only one store in the county, or the young woman buried beneath a construction site and mummified so that her remains had barely altered in twenty years, with severe scarring to her left hip, probably from a car accident. How was it they had never been identified?
The only probable reason was that someone didn’t want them found. In all likelihood, the reports had never been filed and the searches never begun. But if so, where were the grandmothers missing grandchildren, the husbands missing wives, and sisters missing brothers? Only a concerted conspiracy of silence by friends and family could have left them unnamed and unclaimed. For every one w
ho vanished, Dan reasoned, there had to be between four and forty people who would notice sooner or later.
He could never shake off a sense of futility when he went through those files, thinking of all the faces that might never be identified, all the lives that would never be reconnected with their pasts. Some had wanted to vanish, true enough, and that’s exactly what they’d done. But had they really meant it to be forever?
New technology and improved networking between agencies sharing databases sometimes made identification possible decades later. The DNA retrieved when the bodies were first recovered might no longer be usable, but if the remains were exhumed then experts could take fresh samples that would respond to modern testing. Sometimes it was just a matter of diligence and old-fashioned stick-to-it-ness. Other times, it seemed a wasted effort. You never knew. Often families didn’t come forward for years then suddenly, for one reason or another, they did. Files were crosschecked with other files and it became a simple matter of matching a name to a photograph. It could be surprisingly simple.
It kept Dan up nights wondering why families waited so long to report a missing relative. The reasons varied. Sometimes the misper had a habit of disappearing and it was assumed they wanted to stay lost. Others had a criminal record and the family believed they would only make things worse by looking for them. Then years went by without word, and it began to dawn on them that perhaps their son or daughter was no longer alive. Still others turned up alive years later — sometimes decades — and at last spoke about threats of violence or the trauma of an unwanted child. You just never knew.
But there was one thing Dan knew: once asked, the questions didn’t go away just because they went unanswered. They hung around and festered, especially when you looked at them too closely. It was easy to obsess over unsolved clues, like the faded handwriting on a piece of paper that refused to yield up its secrets or a lake on a mountain that obscured its origins.
Lake on the Mountain: A Dan Sharp Mystery Page 21
