Lake on the Mountain: A Dan Sharp Mystery

by Jeffrey Round

  “I’m very glad to hear that,” Larry went on. “So are you taking on the case?”

  “I’m considering it, yes.”

  “Then I have to advise you that the Killingworth family would take exception to your decision if you choose to take on that request. Craig Killingworth’s disappearance twenty years ago caused his family considerable grief, which they have since managed to get over. They would not want all that stirred up again. They would also not take kindly to having you turn against them now.”

  Dan was completely thrown. If they didn’t want him to take on the case, then who did? His tongue suddenly got stuck to the roof of his mouth. “In what capacity are you advising me, Mr. Fiske?”

  “In a personal one.”

  He oozed unctuousness. Dan decided he would hate this guy if he ever met him.

  “Perhaps it’s a good time to mention that it has come to my attention there’s some question of attempted rape in connection with you and a guest of the Killingworths.…”

  Dan exploded. “What?”

  Larry went on as though he hadn’t been interrupted. “… as well as a question of intent to spread the HIV virus. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. If a test shows you to be HIV-positive, you could be up on charges of attempted murder.”

  “Who’s going to order me to take an HIV-test?”

  “You know very well that it’s within the jurisdiction of any court, should the matter come to that.”

  There was silence on the other end. Dan felt his heart galloping a path through his stomach, but he wasn’t going to let a lawyer get the better of him. “Don’t try to bully me, Mr. Fiske. And don’t insult my intelligence. I’m obviously smarter than you.”

  “Really?” Fiske’s voice dripped disdain. “How do you figure that?”

  “Simple — because I’m not a lawyer. And if anything, I’m the one who should be worried about catching something.”

  “Yes, Mr. Sharp. You probably should be very worried. I’ll leave you with those thoughts.”

  The call clicked off.

  “Son-of-a-fucking bitch!” Dan snarled. His hand shook as he forced himself not to bang the receiver down. His mouth was dry. He tried to marshal his thoughts. Things were definitely getting out of hand. And worse, what he’d assumed about being hired to find Craig Killingworth was totally false. The mystery was spreading, with no sign of who wanted Killingworth found.

  Dan thought back to the report. Craig Killingworth had disgraced himself in his hometown and in the eyes of his family, then got on his bicycle and — what? Been hit by a car and died? Committed a crime and scrammed? Or simply started a new life for himself without looking back? All of these were possible. Sometimes locating a missing person seemed like taking a multiple-choice exam. Other times it felt like digging through the rubble to find something you only suspected was there, if it wasn’t in one of a thousand other places.

  Sometimes, with a few known facts, it was like a recipe. Put in all the ingredients, including a few conjectured ones, stir round and round, and voila! — a cake — though in this case a particularly inedible one. Dan smiled at his analogy. He’d try it out on his boss one day. When he’d cleared himself of the filing cabinet incident. When his boss regained a sense of humour. Okay, maybe not. And — oh yes! — don’t forget the missing ingredient: I have to advise you that the Killingworth family would take exception to your decision if you choose to take on that request. That was the icing on the cake. Maybe Lucille Killingworth did not want her husband found. Why? Did she have something to hide?

  Dan looked over the information Sally had left on his desk. He turned to his computer and checked flight schedules then pressed the intercom button. His boss answered. “Good morning, Daniel.”

  “Good morning, Ed. It’s about the Killingworth case.…”

  “I haven’t had time to think about who I might be able to spare.”

  “It’s okay,” Dan cut him off. “I don’t want you to replace me. I’ve decided to stay on with it. If that’s all right.”

  He heard his boss give a confused chuckle. “Yes — by all means. It’s fine with me. More than fine.”

  “Good,” Dan said. “In fact,” he checked his watch, “I’m off in about three hours to catch a plane to B.C. to follow up on a lead there.”

  “Fascinating. Enjoy the weather.”

  “I’ll be sure to do that.”

  Eighteen

  Islands in the Strait

  From the windows of the plane, the green span of Lion’s Gate Bridge glinted in the sunlight. Below, the city was a quilt of urban crosshatches rolled up against the mountains and edged down to the sea. For the first time in weeks, Dan felt a sense of relief. Maybe it was just the rush of flying, the release of escape. Flight brought a sense of endless possibility, of life lived elsewhere than the city he’d planned and failed to leave every year for the last ten years. (Then again, he reminded himself, it always felt a little like failure to think he might actually leave it for good.) Or it may have been his proximity to Trevor, the Mayne Island Hermit, whom he hadn’t yet made up his mind to see. It wouldn’t do to get Trevor’s hopes up if things were suddenly to take him elsewhere. The vicissitudes of fate did not smile favourably upon chance love affairs in strange cities. The gardener he’d come to find might prove not to be here after all, putting an abrupt end to his trip. Still, a call at least was in order: Hello, I’m here. Goodbye again. But what was the point?

  Beneath them, the Earth turned while the plane resisted gravity. For the moment he was a pirate, an Old World explorer circling the new one, with endless opportunities stretched out below. And in those limitless seconds of suspension, right up until the moment the wheels touched ground and life resumed its expected course, it seemed as though anything could happen.

  They were over the Strait of Georgia. Below, the Earth lay fractured in a myriad broken pieces. Mayne Island was one of them, a soft bed to land in. The dying light gave the islands a magical cast, their dismembered outlines surrounded by silvery moats and darkening shorelines.

  Surrey, on the other hand, was anything but magical. It was tawdry and squalid, though unlike other urban disasters this one wore its squalor with a sort of hometown pride. B.C.’s moderate climate and reputation as a haven for drug users had created an underclass of addicts and an attendant criminal fringe element. The push to ready Vancouver for the Olympics had unsettled its transient population, and many had migrated to the tidal plains to the south.

  Picking up his rental car at the airport, Dan watched a wreck of a man scouring the asphalt for cigarette butts. The ride got grimmer the closer he got. Surrey made the unseemly parts of Toronto look like a picnic basket on a checkered tablecloth. He stopped for directions at a 7-Eleven. A Native woman approached him holding a can of Schlitz, tab clicked open. She held it out, her expression childlike. “Drink?”

  “No thanks.”

  “What’s your story, honey?” she asked.

  “No story — just looking for directions.”

  She smiled hopefully. “You want directions to my place?”

  Dan shook his head.

  “I got beer,” she said.

  “I can see that. Thanks anyway.”

  His hotel lobby was bright and cheerful, but the effect ended there. A doughy young man handed Dan his keys and pointed down a dim hallway with a carpet one shade away from dog vomit. It bulged when he stepped on it, as though he were walking on something alive. Irregular stains indicated either an errant house pet or water leakage. He looked up. Sure enough, the ceiling bore telltale signs of dripping.

  At first glance his room appeared fine, apart from a faint odour of wet fur that permeated everything. Dan opened his suitcase and hung up his clothes. Jet lag was hitting him in the back of the neck. At home it was already past midnight. He stripped off his shirt and pants and lay on the bed in his underwear. He looked up at a sudden sound. Ten feet outside his window, a very large woman appeared on a balcony and began
to pull laundry from a line. She was backlit, dressed in a shift that emphasized her shapelessness. Dan crept sheepishly over and drew the curtains.

  He thought of Bill and laughed, imagining his distaste at being stuck in such a place. Then he thought of Trevor again — so near, yet so far. He toyed with the idea of calling but decided against it. He watched part of a movie and a bit of news, then turned off the television and slept.

  The neighbourhood would have been hard put to say it had seen better days. Nor did it look like it ever would. It was a shameless, almost desperate mismatching of poorly constructed warehouses, chemical plants, and odd-fitting homes with yards buried under debris that seemed like they’d never had the temerity to hope for anything better. Nor, in all likelihood, had its denizens.

  Dan approached a row of townhouses that appeared to have survived a bombing blitz, but only barely, one of which bore the number listed as the last known address for Magnus Ferguson. The fenced-in front yard resembled a dustbin and suggested the wrecker’s ball would not be far off. To each his own, Dan thought. He knocked, but no one answered. The stillness that came back might have been the stillness of a mausoleum.

  A window lifted on the second floor of an attached house. A scruffy head poked out, little more than a skull with a wisp of grey fleece stretched over it. “Who is there?” called down a gap-toothed East Indian, a smile shifting his unshaven jowls.

  “I’m looking for Magnus Ferguson,” Dan said. “Do you know if he still lives here?”

  The man chuckled. “Maggie? No, sir — he doesn’t live here no more. I haven’t seen him in years.” He stopped to scratch his head. “He could be dead, for all I know.” He smiled, as if the thought brought him some small comfort.

  “Is there anyone else around who might know where he went?”

  The man shook his head. “No, sir. If I don’t know it, no one does. I see everything around here. Whatever goes on, I hear about it. I’m in the wheelchair, you see?” He lifted himself up by the arms and pressed closer to the sill, as if willing Dan to see the chair he claimed lay under him. His head and torso slumped back down.

  Dan pulled a card from his pocket and held it up for the man to see. “My name’s Sharp,” he said. “Dan Sharp. I’m going to stick this under your door. I’ll write my hotel number on it. If anything comes to mind, please call me.”

  “Sir, excuse me for asking, but does it pay?”

  Dan looked up from where he’d knelt to insert the card. “It could,” he said. “If it leads to anything, it could.”

  “I’ll see, sir, if I can turn anything up for you.” The man poked his head with a finger. “I am all the time having ideas.”

  “I’d be much obliged.”

  The second address turned out to be only blocks away, though Magnus Ferguson’s tenancy there predated the other by more than a decade. A pair of raggedly dressed men lay on the steps, their legs barring the doorway. One was an older man, small and wiry. He looked like he’d lived a long time on the streets. The younger appeared to have a few years to go before he caught up with his companion.

  Dan stopped in front of them. The younger man eyed him warily and motioned to his companion to let Dan pass.

  “You a cop?” said the older man, making a half-hearted attempt to move out of Dan’s way.

  “No,” said Dan.

  “See,” said the older man to the other. “He ain’t gonna hurt ya.” He put a hand out to touch Dan’s leg. Dan stepped out of his reach.

  “Don’t touch him, man!” his companion said, spooked.

  “I’m just being friendly,” said the other.

  “Okay, but don’t touch him, man. He doesn’t want to be touched.”

  “You two live here?” Dan asked, breaking up the pathetic charade.

  The pair looked at one another, as though to get their story straight before answering. “Nah,” said the young man, shaking his head. “We don’t live around here.”

  Dan mentioned Magnus Ferguson, but the name drew a blank. “Thanks, then.”

  He took the stairs to the third floor. The hallway reeked of urine and years of accumulated neglect. There’d once been carpet laid down, but that had been ripped out and remnants of an adhesive left stuck to the concrete floor. He knocked on a faded blue door that opened almost immediately. A thin woman in a pink sweater stared at him. Stringy hair hung down past her shoulders. Dan would have been hard put to say if she were young or old. The smell of something meaty and slightly sour caught his nose.

  She looked at him uncertainly. “Oh, I thought you were Mary,” she said, tucking a brown strand behind one ear. Then, “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for a former tenant, Mr. Magnus Ferguson,” Dan said. “I believe he lived here a number of years ago.”

  She scrunched her brow and appeared to be thinking. “Doesn’t sound familiar,” she said, turning back to the room. “Mom? Do you remember a Magnus Ferguson used to live here?”

  “Oh, yes,” came the feeble reply. “He used to live down the hall when we first moved here. You were still a kid, though, so you wouldn’t remember him likely.”

  “You’re right, I don’t,” the woman called out over her shoulder. She turned back to Dan. “I don’t remember him,” she said with a shrug.

  “Who’s asking?” came the mother’s voice.

  “My name’s Dan Sharp,” he called over the pink shoulder. “I’m a missing persons investigator. Would you by any chance know where Mr. Ferguson moved to?”

  “Let me think. I seem to recall he moved just a few streets away from here. I saw him once or twice after he moved.”

  Dan read out the address he’d just visited. “Would that be where he moved?”

  “That sounds right,” came the disembodied voice.

  “He’s not there now, but thank you.” He wrote Magnus’s name on the back of a card and gave it to the woman in the doorway. “Call me, please, if you or your mother think of anything else.”

  She scrutinized it then looked up. “Uh-huh. Okay. Will do.” She smiled sadly and watched till he reached the end of the hallway before closing the door.

  On the ground floor, the two derelicts were still lying on the doorstep. They looked up with glazed eyes at Dan’s approach. He seemed to register with them briefly before they turned away again.

  The doughy hotel clerk recognized him as he crossed the lobby. He hailed Dan and handed him a note. “I didn’t want to miss you, sir,” he said, as though he’d been waiting anxiously all afternoon for Dan’s return.

  “Thank you for being watchful,” Dan said, tipping him. He looked at the note: Call Ahmed Rathnam (“guy in wheelchair”), followed by a phone number.

  “Hello, Ahmed, this is Dan Sharp. I got your message.”

  “Hello, sir. Good to hear from you. Mr. Sharp, I think I may have some information for you, sir.”

  “About Magnus Ferguson?”

  “I have indeed, Mr. Sharp. I think you will be pleased. I have an address for you.”

  Dan’s ears picked up at that. “Is it recent?”

  The man laughed again. “Sir, I know it is recent.”

  “I’ll be right over,” Dan said.

  He was at the man’s door in fifteen minutes. Ahmed waved at him from the same window. He turned back to the room and Dan heard him call out. A moment later, a small boy opened the door and looked up with wide brown eyes.

  “Come in, please.”

  Ahmed appeared at the top of the stairs in his wheelchair. “Sir, I think you will be pleased with what I have found for you. It is an address. A current address.” He called out to the boy, who ran nimbly up the stairs and snatched a paper from his hand and back down again, handing it to Dan.

  Dan read it over and looked up. “I’m grateful. Will fifty dollars compensate you for your troubles?”

  The man bowed his head. “I humbly thank you.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking — where did you get this?”

  The man laughed. His in
dex finger touched his forehead and pointed up. “I told you, sir, I am all the time having ideas. This woman comes to collect the mail once or twice a month. I sent my grandson Naveen out to find her and he came back with this.”

  “And this is where she sends his mail?”

  Dan read the rural route and postal box number on Vancouver Island. There was no guarantee Magnus Ferguson would be there, but it merited a try. He might be seeing Trevor sooner rather than later.

  “It is, sir. It is.”

  Dan handed the boy the reddish bill.

  The boy grinned as he held it out before him. “Five-zero. Fifty. That’s a lots of money!” he exclaimed.

  “Yes, it is,” Dan said. “Make sure your grandfather buys you something nice with it.”

  The boy nodded, smiling. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Oh, yes! No more kurta pyjama. I want Game Boy!”

  Out on deck, the engine’s hum filled the air. A blurry moon burned a bone-white path along the darkened strait. Mountains loomed black on either side of the boat, deceptively close. Mayne Island was somewhere ahead. If Trevor sounded welcoming, Victoria could wait a day or two.

  He flipped open his cell phone and dialled. Trevor’s reassuring voice answered.

  “Hi there, sexy guy.”

  There was a pause. “Dan?” The voice was hesitant.

  “Correct. How are you?”

  “Great! I’m really well, thanks! How are you?”

  “I’m doing all right, too. I thought I’d call and say hi.”

  “Well, I’m glad you did. It’s good to hear from you. It sounds really windy, by the way. Where are you?”

  “Outside on my cell phone.”

  “It’s nice to hear your voice.”

  “And yours. I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.”

  Trevor laughed softly. “That’s sweet. Though it would be nicer to hear you say it in person. I was serious when I said you could visit any time.”