The Devil's Dust

by C. B. Forrest

  Nolan uncrosses his arms and stands tall, almost at attention. “I just got off the phone with them,” he says. “They’ve been at the hospital since he was admitted. The father said they were planning their first family trip to Mexico this March, and now they’re planning a funeral.”

  The room falls silent for a time. Madsen finally clears her throat and sets her briefcase on the floor.

  McKelvey says, “I’m sorry. This is Inspector Finn Madsen of the OPP.”

  The men stare for a moment, hardly hiding their indifference, and then introduce themselves and one by one they stand to shake her hand. There are no attempts at phoney welcome or small-town charm. This is uncomfortable for all, and the mayor, Danny Marko, looks as though he might cry. His eyes are red and welling. If McKelvey feels like an interloper, he can only imagine how awkward this must be for Madsen, cop or no cop. This is a small and closed room in a small and remote community.

  “I know the Watsons well,” Marko says, sitting up. “This is insanity. Mark Watson was an A student six months ago. What the fuck is happening to this place. Excuse my language.”

  He sits again, or more truthfully wilts to the chair.

  “I hope I can help with that answer,” Madsen says. “I have some experience with methamphetamine in the rural context. I took an extensive training course offered by the Drug Enforcement Agency. They’re cutting their teeth on this issue in small towns all over the middle west. ”

  The men simply stare back at her.

  “I sure hope your fancy courses can help us, miss. You’ll have to excuse me, I need to go and help the Watsons with their arrangements,” Marko says. “They’ve got to bring their boy back home here to be buried. And little Scotty Cooper can head off down to Kingston to the penitentiary instead of going to college.”

  The mayor takes his coat from a hook, pulls it on, and walks slowly to the door. Madsen moves aside to let him pass. Nolan follows the mayor and is about to close the door behind him when he hears the outer door open. Marko and Gallagher trade a few words and then the Chief comes in. He looks better, though not entirely well. His eyes are tired and his cheeks are red where a blade has just moments ago scraped away the silver stubble. The smell of half-digested booze has been masked with a good splashing of strong cologne, something manly, cedars and boot leather.

  “Chief Gallagher,” he says, and extends a hand with his politician’s smile.

  “Inspector Madsen,” she says. “Finn Madsen.”

  “I could use a coffee there, Eddie. Why don’t you put on a fresh pot while we all sit down and meet Miss Madsen here.”

  “Inspector Madsen will do just fine.”

  She smiles to warm the comment a little, but the frosty edge remains.

  If murder is still front-page news in the world’s largest and most dangerous cities, then in a place like Ste. Bernadette it must be a seeming force of nature or anti-nature, a foreign organism blown in on the winds of something evil, capable of forever altering the landscape and social fabric. For one thing, it invariably means at least two families have come together in the most violent and base way within the circle of humanity, the effects of which reverberate for generations. McKelvey is thinking of this notion, prying his memory of the wildcat strike and the explosion at the utility shed, the death of that scab worker, how the old guys at the Station Hotel had mentioned his father was somehow implicated. And then Duncan, the night manager, had said something cryptic a few days later. He’d bumped into McKelvey at the Coffee Time and he said, “Don’t believe everything George Fergus says about your old man there.” And that was it.

  Now he re-focuses on the here and now.

  “They’ll need to be sent for proper analysis,” Dr. Nichols says, “and I’m no forensic pathologist, but those aren’t human bones up there. No sir. Deer likely.”

  Nolan’s eyes flash. “So Wade Garson is still out there somewhere?”

  “I didn’t want to say anything in front of the mayor,” Dr. Nichols continues, soft-spoken and measured, the same voice he uses when explaining some untreatable illness to his elderly patients. “I couldn’t find any other remains in there. The explosion and fire were intense, but you’d need heat sustained at 700 to 800 degrees for several hours in order to turn bone completely to ash. There’d be the femurs for one thing, the skull for sure. So, yes, I’d say there’s a good chance Wade Garson wasn’t in that trailer when it blew.”

  Madsen makes notes in shorthand in a small notebook with a black cover, something that looks department-issued. McKelvey stirs sugar into his coffee and pictures the scene. Someone dragging a dead animal into the fire. No, it would be too risky. The animal being dumped in there prior to the explosion. Either way, it was obvious the carcass had been set there with the purpose of confusing the police, at the very least buying some time.

  “He set the whole thing up,” Nolan says. “He knew we were circling in on him.”

  “We don’t know that,” McKelvey says. He wants to push farther, give a short lesson in the consequences of making assumptions too early in a case. God knows he learned that lesson the hard way many, many times. “We’ve got to stick with what we know, which isn’t much. No living relatives of Garson we can call, check to see if he’s made contact?”

  Gallagher shakes his head. “Got an older brother, Hank, that’s all. And he’s doing time at Monteith. Worth a call, though. Nolan, you can add that to your list.”

  “I’d like to speak with the family of this boy, Mark Watson,” Madsen says.

  “I should be the one to do that,” says Gallagher. “They might be a little sensitive to an outsider during this difficult time.”

  “I’ll have to insist, Chief,” she says. “This is now a murder directly related to the sale of methamphetamine. You’ve already got a teen sitting in the detention centre for his meth-induced attack on Constable Nolan. Whoever manufactured the product, whoever sold it, may not be criminally responsible for Watson’s murder. But they are responsible for introducing it to this community. The one thing I learned from my work with the DEA, we need to trace this back to the very root and cut it out. I’ll start with the boy’s family. Find out who he was hanging with, any new behaviours they noticed. And someone needs to get in to see the accused, this Scotty Cooper. Push him to reveal where the dope was coming from.”

  “I’ll be there when you meet with the Watsons,” Gallagher says. “And that’s not negotiable.”

  “Fine. I’d also suggest we get a bulletin posted on Wade Garson to all local and provincial police within a hundred kilometres. And it wouldn’t hurt to talk to the principal at the high school, maybe the teacher that the kids think is the coolest of the bunch, most likely to have an ear to the ground.”

  “I can do that,” McKelvey offers.

  “Sounds like we’ve got a plan here,” Gallagher says. “I’ll take you over to the Station Hotel, get you checked in. I’ll get the Watsons on the phone and see if they’re coming back to town tonight or tomorrow.”

  “First thing, though, I’d like to visit the scene of the fire,” says Madsen, “and then go and see these bones for myself. Dr. Nichols, are you able to accompany us?”

  The doctor nods. “You’ll want some rubber boots.”

  Twenty-One

  Having anticipated the moment she would slip inside and close the door to this confined and anonymous space, find herself easing into a deep tub of hot water, Finn Madsen is beyond disappointed when she sees her room at the Station Hotel. In fact, she stands there at the threshold of the doorway for a long minute. Crap, she thinks. She is reminded of western movies, and can’t help but conjure images of scenes played out in this very space. Lonesome nights of desperate acts. She closes the door, sets her briefcase on the bureau, and hangs the garment bag in the small closet. The room smells as though it has been sealed shut for months.

  She sits on the edge of the bed and sinks deep enough to feel the metal from the coiled bedsprings. It has been a twenty-hour day. Up long b
efore dawn for one final argument with her husband, not speaking to one another on the drive to the airport, the flight in the Dash-8 that bounced and burped all the way from Orillia to that field in the middle of the thickest woods she has ever seen. Flying in low, the regional airport appeared like a concentration camp tucked away from civilization. A long day of enduring the cold and the male jackassery of this silver-haired cowboy, Chief Gallagher. Treating her like she is his granddaughter. Miss this, dear that. She knows she will tell him to piss off pretty soon. She thinks she could detect a lingering smell of booze on the man, and that would be just par for the course for these small-town coppers. The old man is a living, breathing cliché.

  She moves to the bathroom, runs a hand in the darkness across the wall. She finds and flicks the light switch. A sixty-watt bulb flickers, hesitates, and then glows steady. The weak lighting does nothing for the room or her mood. There is a toilet, a sink stained brown at the drain from brackish water, and a shallow tub with a shower spout that is crusted with calcium and lime. The tub is also stained and scratched, dark gouges pocked like scars against white enamel. A bath is out of the question. As is room service, she imagines. She is starving, but the hunger has moved from growls and pangs to that place where she can focus again and ride it out, so hungry she is no longer hungry. The body is strange, she thinks, how we get used to pain or discomfort, how we learn to adapt to changing environments and conditions. She knows, for example, in a day or two the sight of this room will summon feelings of rest and privacy. It will become hers, for better or for worse. This is the greatest trait of humanity, she thinks: we adapt and we survive.

  There are reports to file, and so she moves to the bureau and flicks on the small desk lamp. She opens the briefcase and pulls out a laptop and her notepad. She has a slim digital voice recorder, too, which she used when she and Gallagher spoke briefly with Mark Watson’s father, David Watson, on the phone from the hospital in Timmins. The father was grief-stricken and exhausted, but managed to confirm that his son’s behaviour had changed drastically in the past couple of months. Mark had experimented with marijuana, David was sure of that, and had skipped classes here and there. But there was a marked change after Christmas. The boy seemed to withdraw, became defiant, spent entire days away from school, and his behaviour grew increasingly erratic, staying up all night playing video games in the basement, irritable, no appetite.

  She hits the play button and David Watson’s voice fills the spare room, weary and hoarse from lack of sleep:

  “We thought it was normal teenage stuff at first. But I see it now. The difference. We had no idea, no clue. We’re both working, we’re one of the lucky families, both my wife and I still have jobs. For now anyway. We assumed he would pull out of it. I guess we were just too busy. Now he’s dead …”

  “Who is his best friend?” she hears herself asking, all of their voices disembodied across the telephone lines. “The one person he would trust?”

  The recording picks up movements and voices in the background at the hospital. She closes her eyes. She pictures the room where he is calling from, a respite area for families. Soothing paintings on the walls, benign landscapes of Canadiana. She has never met the man, but she pictures his face, eyes closed, holding back the tears.

  “Scott,” he almost whispers. “The boy who stabbed him.”

  She stops the recorder and jots a few notes down. This will be her first interview. The murder suspect. She reviews her other notes from the day. The scene at the trailer was a disaster. The locals traipsed back and forth as though it were a fairground. The coroner is correct, however, in that the bones he discovered are most certainly not human. There have been no reported sightings of Wade Garson. In the morning she will request a ride to the correctional centre to interview the boy, Scotty Cooper. And she will attempt to interview the young officer wounded in the explosion, Constable Younger.

  This town, it seems to her, is an icon. A dying way of life. A place carved from a single resource, and now the resource is in decline, and there is no backup plan. This nation was born and raised rural, she thinks, our tradition is in farming and exploiting the land, and yet today that connection is lost. We live in cities, or more accurately, we live in sprawling suburbs, we work in cities, and we buy our food in anonymous warehouses. She has been here a dozen hours and already she can tell there is no hope, there is only a sense of quiet acquiescence to this evolution. For now, there is nothing she can do. She is exhausted. And hungry again. She pulls her parka on and leaves in search of potato chips or jujubes, anything to fill the empty space.

  He is dreaming that he is trapped in a large house, running a maze of hallways, and there is a phone ringing and ringing, and each door he opens only leads to another door and the sound of the phone ringing seems always to be coming from the next room down the hall.

  When McKelvey opens his eyes and holds his breath, he hears the jangle of the telephone in the kitchen downstairs. It sounds like a dentist’s drill, and he jumps out of bed and scrambles. Caroline has found him. She is on the line, he knows, and she has set up a conference call with Dr. Shannon and probably a team of psychiatrists. He takes the stairs two at a time, slides on the tile into the kitchen, snatching the receiver in mid-ring.

  “Yes,” he says. His heart hammers in his chest and he is winded.

  “This McKeller?”

  The man’s voice is gruff, rough from cigarettes. McKelvey gets his bearings and realizes it is the middle of the night. Dark outside.

  “McKelvey, yeah. Who is this?”

  McKelvey hears sounds in the background, engines, big rigs gearing down, whining in the distance.

  “Wade Garson.”

  McKelvey is still breathing hard. The sudden waking and the flight down the stairs have his T-shirt visibly undulating over his heart. He is sweating again, too, his face suddenly slick. The snake is back, curling through his lower intestines, forcing its evil into his belly, up to the back of his throat. He could puke. Will puke.

  “How did you get my number?” he asks, and swallows the bile.

  There is the sound of a lighter sparking, the caller drawing air.

  “Fucking hard, that’s how,” Garson says. “Had to call the goddamned operator for new listings. Three times. Starting with your name, Mc-Something, and then down to who got a phone hooked up.”

  McKelvey can hear the mechanics of the man’s smoking. The lips, the draw of air, the exhalation. The distant sound of an engine gearing down. Calling from a phone booth out on the highway somewhere. The truck stop. The only real possibility. Open around the clock.

  “Where are you now?” McKelvey says. He eyes the sink and the faucet and wants to stick his head beneath a flow of cool water that smells and tastes of the earth, burn the fever to a steam.

  “I don’t trust no fucking cops, but you’re the only one of the bunch not from here. So I got no choice, see. You’re not from here and you don’t know me and maybe that means I stand a fucking chance.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I been set up. This is bullshit. I heard what they’re saying, and it’s a lie, a fucking lie. But who’s gonna believe Wade Garson, right? The Garsons can’t hardly spell their own names, bunch of fucking redneck losers. Well you know what, asshole, I sell pot and hash and pills when I can get them, that’s right, and I’ll get you parts for your car, no problem. But you think I’m cooking goddamned meth out there? I never even smoked that shit myself.”

  McKelvey clears his throat and he blinks. The kitchen is still and quiet, and then the fridge clicks on and begins to hum with electrical current. The new sound is strangely soothing, and his fever ebbs. He takes a deep breath and feels well again.

  “I can help you, Wade. Let me come to you and we can get this figured out. You’re going to get picked up sooner or later. They’ve got a bulletin out on you.”

  “How the hell are you going to help me with Sheriff Smiley and that dipshit Nolan? That rookie Younger thought
he’d be a hero, jumping in like that. I saw it, you know. I was coming through the woods. I almost got myself blown to shit. Lucky for me I was off jacking a whitetail. Everything I got was in that place, mister. I hauled ass after I seen Younger fall over from the smoke, Mr. Hero gonna save the day. And I cut through the woods and caught a ride out on the highway a few miles south of my lane.”

  “You can’t run forever. You don’t know me from a stranger. All I can do is give you my word. I’ll come to you and we can talk. If you don’t think we can fix this together, I’ll let you take off to wherever you want.”

  “Bullshit,” Garson says. And he draws mucous from the depths of his sinus, and he spits. “You’ll just let me ride off like that, I bet.”

  “I don’t have a gun, Wade. I don’t even have handcuffs. I’m not interested in being a hero here, riding you back to town. You’ve got my word on that.”

  “I’m at the truck stop. I know the waitress and she’ll cover for me if the highway cops come by, but not for long. I’ll be in the washrooms at the back of the building. Middle stall. And you better say who you are, ’cause I’ve got a blade here, man. I’m not doing time like my brother Hank on some trumped-up charges.”

  “It’ll take me half an hour, but I’ll be there.”

  McKelvey hangs up the phone and moves to the sink. He turns on the tap and he stoops and scoops water and pours it over the back of his neck, cups it and splashes his face, finally drinks a mouthful. It is the cleanest, coldest water he has ever tasted. Earth, rocks, and minerals.

  “Fuck all mighty,” he says, and wipes his face with the bottom of his T-shirt.

  The fridge stops, its final hum a reverberation in the empty room. He feels horrible. He is shocked and ashamed. He has underestimated the strength and grip of those seemingly benign pain pills. Once begun, one is obliged to maintain a baseline, a sort of maintenance level. Besides some rare moments of stupefaction when he has unwisely pushed beyond the regular daily amount of four pills — morning, noon, dinner, and bedtime — he recalls no jarring or unsettling effect beyond the obviously desired numbness. Once the flow has ceased, and done so with a cold and sudden halt, this is another matter altogether. He understands with a new sense of humility what he has done to himself, how he has meandered to this very place through his cynical philosophies, a belief in his ability to fight anything if given a fair shake. It is difficult to determine, here at the sink, whether he has been trying to kill himself or save himself.