Lost Girls

by Andrew Pyper

  “So?”

  “So.”

  So she was real. Real in the manner of the unreal. Someone you could base a story on, as soon a romance as a tale of vengeful horror. A once-living woman, but more than this? Nothing but a flayed, insistent slip of history.

  “Hard to believe this woman is the Lake St. Christopher monster,” I say after a while.

  “She’s not. Or only a part of her is.”

  “And which part is that?”

  “What we’ve had to make up. The worst parts we could imagine.”

  I throw my head around the room for a last tour of the televisions. Pull my wallet from a back pocket but Pittle holds up his hands. I thank him for the beers, say we should do it again sometime soon. Raise myself as he assembles his notes and photocopies into a pile and pushes them across the table at me. But I shake my head, eyes held above the words on the paper.

  “Don’t think I’ll need that, thanks.”

  Pittle frowns briefly, launches back into his chair. “How’s the trial going?” he asks as I put on my coat to leave.

  Struggle for a moment to think what it is I’m being asked.

  “It’s only just started,” I say.

  Outside, the clouds have broken up into islands of ice caught in a gray stream. The air cold enough to tighten skin against nose, chin and forehead. Make my way over to where the Lincoln’s parked with the unsure steps of a Legion Hall drunk, an old man crumpled under the burdens of solitude and war stories.

  I keep both hands buried in coat pockets. The right plays its fingers over a slip of glossy paper. No larger than a pack of matches but it fills my hand, warms through the layers of fabric to the skin. A picture of a woman, a face stolen from an unfinished history.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Everyone loves a crime scene.

  This is where I’m parked, looking out the Lincoln’s passenger window at Murdoch’s most recent historical site. It must be that I love a crime scene as much as the next guy, or at least as much as the guys and their guests who came out here last night and built a fire on the other side of the police tape using an empty beer case for kindling. Around it the evidence of secondary entertainments: strewn beer bottles and a mickey of Captain Morgan, a forgotten hash pipe and a condom (unused) left wrinkled in the dirt like a shed snake skin. The Murdoch Tourist Board is clearly missing an opportunity here. They should be commissioning a statue. There should be guided tours.

  I’m here for a tour myself. A search for a derelict cottage which, if Mrs. Arthurs is to be believed, lies somewhere down the trail on the undeveloped side of the lake. Pop a couple of Extra Strength Tylenols to combat the headache that threatens to claw through my forehead. Blast the car’s heater to full and let it blow over hands and face until the skin feels like it’s about to curl back from the bone. Ready.

  I follow the trail past Mrs. Arthurs’s, keeping my eyes straight ahead in case she happened to be fussing around her woodpile again. Beyond her property the path narrows and reduces my progess to a hunched stumble, an arch of cedar branches scrabbling across my back. Twice my head connects with wet bark and twice a fuck exits my mouth to echo out into the dripping forest. A bloodstain appears on my pants (dropped from my hand, cut trying to push aside a tentacle of spiky sumach) but I’m not yet wondering why the hell I’m out here or what I hope to find. I just keep going.

  How is it that if one walks far enough in the woods one eventually comes across the rusted frame of an abandoned car? There’s never an obvious indication of how it got there, no nearby road, level field or habitation. In fact the fin-tailed sedan I see now, fifty feet off the trail and obscured among the high ferns, is so tightly encircled by a half-dozen glacial boulders there seems no way it could have gotten there unless dropped from above. Stripped of all rubber, leather and glass, its rims buried in the soft earth, the hood gaping open with nothing inside. For a time I stare at its drooping front grille and its headlight sockets stare back at me, bewildered, watery with moss.

  Further along, further in, stepping through cobwebs that strain over my brow. On either side grass-riddled rock pushes up through the earth like hairy moles. My nose four feet above the root-veined earth sniffing its damp, vegetative perfumes. Keep looking to one side and the other but aside from occasional garbage and a couple outhouse-size sheds with unclear functions there’s no sign of the man-made.

  Then I see something. It’s only because half the leaves have fallen and I happen to be looking in the right direction that I notice it at all given its near invisibility forty feet down from the trail. The forest hides it, claiming it for its own, the mounded sod of the once-cleared lot now taken over by the looping vines and saplings straining up over others to take a greater share of the light. Inside this wild growth, a long abandoned cottage.

  I crunch through the weave of mature branches that block my way off the trail and walk around the building’s exterior. It’s not unlike the other cottages on the farside of the lake: same sturdy rectangle with a framed window at the front looking down to the water, a door opening up onto a narrow deck that sags into a long frown, and at the back, three windows for each of the bedrooms and a smaller one for the bathroom’s ventilation. What’s different is twenty-odd years of neglect evidenced in the warped roof, missing shingles and windows shattered by bored canoeists or the impact of birds who saw the glass as a reflected piece of sky. Paint peels off the unprimed wood in toasted strips, the color sun-bleached out of what remains. Under the mildewed eaves, plate-size holes where the raccoons have broken through, and two watery bundles of gray paper, one tattered and loose, the other the current home of a thousand sleeping yellowjackets. All of this crumbling rot in only a couple decades of expired winters and summers. And in a couple decades more it would completely lose its definition as a place where people once ate and slept. That’s how conservative Mother Nature is, the fusty old dear. Always undoing change, turning everything back into itself, taking all the neatly assembled elements apart and making it all green and brown chaos again.

  Step up onto the front deck and the wood moans in soggy complaint under my feet. The front window cracked in a zigzag from the top left corner to the bottom right, but it’s otherwise intact and keeps the wind that comes up off the water from carrying its moisture inside. It also protects the spiders from the elements, who have established layers of web thick enough to create a gauzy haze between inside and out. But if I cup my hands around my eyes there’s still sufficient light to distinguish interior details, wan outlines standing out from the dusting of shade.

  What’s surprising is how much stuff is still here. A couch with leaping deers over its upholstery, a pine dining table standing on three legs with two coffee mugs and a lantern set on its surface, a wagon wheel coffee table sheltering Scrabble and Monopoly games, even a Ouija board with the alphabet, numbers zero through nine and YES and N O in the corners. Most remarkable are the bookshelves occupying every available inch of wall space. There’s a shattered bottle of Crown Royal against the far wall and empty soup tins littering the entire living room floor, but by the look of it the books have been left not only unharmed but untouched.

  I pull away from the glass and try the front door which swings open after a couple scrapes across the uneven floor. The room trembles as I walk in, unused to the moving presence of weight. I wipe my feet on an old Globe and Mail taken from the pile someone had made in a corner of the kitchen and used for kindling. Although there’s plenty of garbage all over the place, for the most part it’s been left as a place where living people had once arranged things how they liked them. Stepping inside this order feels like an infringement. The disruption of a vulnerable balance.

  But I don’t leave yet. Instead, I gravitate toward the opposite shelf and randomly thumb through some of the books. Penciled notes in all the margins now in varying states of dissolve depending on their exposure to the air and moisture and the type of cover that bound them. Let the tips of my fingers play over the dusty lead of the
print, feel for the indentations the words have left in the paper’s surface and close my eyes. Imagine how meaning might exist in the touch, like the shape of a familiar face, like braille.

  When I open my eyes I slide the book in my hands back in the precise slot I took it from. The room’s trembling and the wind’s free movement in through the open door have brought an odd animation to the space. A can rolls and clinks across the floor. A flock of leaves blow in from the deck. From somewhere within the walls the release of an aggrieved sigh.

  I’m startled by the noise my shoes make in the sudden lunge to get out before the door is blown shut. Grab the handle and plow it back against the wall, my heart popping out a syncopated drum solo high in my chest. But once I’m out I end up pulling the door closed myself before I go, as much for reasons of enclosure as preservation of what remains inside.

  The rain coming down harder now, but it’s not the rain that quickens my step back up to the trail. It’s the feeling that I’ve disturbed something that was meant to be left alone, like one of those ancient Egyptian crypts that were carefully hidden underground at the end of a complicated maze but that people eventually discovered and busted open anyway just for the hell of it. On my return I pass Mrs. Arthurs’s place as the trail curves back toward the road but I don’t slow down. I can’t stop from turning to look as my stride turns into an awkward jog. And though the trees obscure my view and the afternoon’s light has almost completely yielded to the sudden dusk I’m sure I see the old woman’s face in the window with a single kerosene lamp flickering on the table behind her, staring back at me with the palms of her hands held white against the glass.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Why do people who do certain things for a living all look the same? Is it the looks that determine the job, or does the job conform the looks? I’m thinking about tax lawyers (nearly always bespectacled, narrow-shouldered, easily startled), undertakers and bureaucrats (both loose-skinned and hound-faced, the muscles responsible for smiling withered from lack of exercise), but mostly police detectives, the most aesthetically homogeneous profession of them all. I’m looking at Bill Butcher, Chief Investigating Officer for Murdoch Region, the man in charge of marshaling the police’s evidence and the Crown’s lead witness. Sitting up in the stand, responding to Goodwin’s questions. A man who could be nothing other than a cop.

  “We found the brown pants about a third of the way down inside the laundry hamper in the hall,” Bill Butcher is saying, his voice disciplined into deep consistency. No emphasis, no cracks, all business. That’s what he’s working for up there, that’s what he likes to hear. A moderately intelligent man who enjoys power and the appearance of responsibility, but who enjoys even more a starchy lunch followed by deep-fried dough and coffee. A man who’s seen enough to know that life is a rough ride and that people are as often desperate and mean as not, but who in the end is more vain than philosophical, the signs of his flagging youth (breasts growing out over a widening gut, liver spots, a firing range score that is the source of jokes back at headquarters) keeping him up at night far longer than the violence and cruelty that plagues a fallen world.

  “There was no indication that there had been an attempt to hide them,” he’s saying. “The muddy shoes were next to the door alongside a pair of slippers and rubber boots.”

  I make notes. At least my hand makes notes, twitching across the page, but I’m unaware of the words it authors. When I raise my eyes from where they’ve been resting the clerk, the cop and the judge all look my way.

  “Mr. Crane?” Justice Goldfarb’s voice.

  “Yes, Your Honor?”

  “Are you with us?”

  “Yes. Sorry. With you now. My apologies to the court.”

  “It’s your turn, Mr. Crane.”

  “Of course. Begging the court’s indulgence. Just collecting my notes.”

  It’s the afternoon of the second day of the cop’s testimony. How much longer was I expecting him to go on? I haven’t even started and I’m fucking up.

  “Detective Butcher, I’d like to begin with your search of the place where Mr. Tripp allegedly parked at Lake St. Christopher on the day in question,” I hear myself saying, watch Butcher’s head go down to his own notes and his mouth emit an answer. It appears that I’m doing something.

  Maybe it’s in the eyes. In cops it dulls their brightness, turns them into dark buttons. School and hospital administrators tend to have eyes like these, but with lower lids. The eyes of people whose jobs involve processing paper without vested interest in their content.

  “So would you say that you’ve had less experience investigating homicide cases than the majority of your colleagues in Toronto?”

  Time has passed since the crime scene questions, and the counsel’s lectern where I stand is thick with paper on which I’ve recorded answers and prepared new questions, but I can’t recall how I’ve brought us here.

  “I can tell you I’ve dealt with some cases up here that detectives down in the city wouldn’t know what to do with,” the cop is saying. From behind me, a man’s throat releases a vulgar laugh.

  What did the peeler’s voice on the phone say? I know what you like.

  “Objection!” Goodwin is calling from his chair.

  Objection? Objection to what?

  “Fine, fine. I’ll rephrase the question, Your Honor,” I say, and then go on and say something else.

  The cop’s eyes are unchanging, but he lowers them to his notes less and less. He must be holding up well. Looking down at the notes is a classic indication of flailing, an effort to buy some time. This guy looks like he’s got all the time in the world.

  So cold.

  “You found mud on the pants and shoes—but let’s make this clear—no blood on anything but the car’s backseat?”

  The nerdy kid, Laird Johanssen. I keep a file on all the hot girls. Isn’t that what he’d said?

  “I’m not trying to draw any conclusions from the underwear photos, Mr. Crane. That’s the jury’s job, as I understand it.”

  Coming in through the nursery window, taking the breath from a baby’s lungs.

  “Come on now, Detective. Would you describe the accused as a man with the physical strength to do what the Crown wants the jury to believe he did?”

  “Could you repeat the question?”

  Christ knows you very well, Mr. Crane.

  “You’re a father, aren’t you Detective Butcher? Couldn’t you understand another man missing his little girl so much he would reach for whatever reminders, whatever small comforts he could find?”

  “No, sir. But I can’t speak for anyone but myself.”

  The Lady never slept and I had to.

  “I think I’ve already answered that, Mr. Crane.”

  “No further questions, Your Honor.”

  An inch of Scotch tape at the top and bottom is all it takes to hold her there. I’ve found a square of uncovered wallpaper in the “V” of sandy light above the bedside lamp and it fits perfectly. A piece of crinkled gloss standing out from the melt of typeset columns, an island of up-close definition in a sea of letters and dots.

  I guess at what her name was. I think of naming her myself. Stand close, hands against the wall for balance. Eyes searching, pushing in.

  I commit the lines of her face to memory.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Bishop’s Hospital lies at the end of a gravel side road off the main highway heading north. Only a small wooden sign marks the place to turn. This would be odd for a regular hospital, where people rush in the middle of the night to have babies delivered or hearts pounded back to life. Insufficient for a place requiring a sign official-looking and prominent enough to be caught in the panicked swing of headlights. But not so odd for an asylum, halfway house, old-age home, or whatever combination this place is.

  Make the turn and bump along the “S”-shaped entryway, dripping boughs bent low enough to scrape across the Lincoln’s windshield before lifting away to expose the hospital at the
end. The building is a converted brick house, better suited to its present purposes than the dwelling place of the single family for whom it must have been originally built. Out front is a wide circle for cars to park with a long-abandoned flower bed in its center, and everywhere else the underbrush has been allowed to creep up against the walls to cover most of the first-floor windows. In fact every effort appears to have been made (or not made) to let the place fall into an advanced state of overgrowth and disrepair. The easier then to be hidden and, with luck, forgotten.

  I approach the single reception desk tucked into the curve of the staircase where a nurse sits with head lowered over papers. Behind her hangs a full-size portrait of a twenty-something Queen Elizabeth sitting on her throne, her youth weighed down by scepter, crown and robes. I’m expecting crosses or a religious mural somewhere, but aside from Her Majesty there’s nothing but bare walls.

  Clear my throat to pull the nurse’s attention away from what turns out to be not papers but the romance novel she’s buried her head in. When she raises her eyes to mine she exposes a face much older that I would have expected, a complicated map of wrinkles and clouded eyes.

  “Welcome to Bishop’s. I’m Nurse Fergus. What can I do for you?” she says in an accent even more abrupt than Mrs. Arthurs’s, the tone flat and lean. A born and bred local.

  “Satisfy curiosities,” I say.

  I tell her that I’m Thom Tripp’s lawyer and that I’m researching the origins of a curious episode in the local history, namely The Lady in the Lake. I’d like to look over the medical records, see if she had a name and what happened to the two girls that were taken from her. When I finish, Nurse Fergus looks up at me with her two-dimensional face, pugnosed and frowning as a Pekingese.