Lost Girls

by Andrew Pyper

  A beagle too new to have been given a name running under the wheels of an Eaton’s furniture delivery truck.

  Three goldfish—Snap, Crackle and Pop—that functioned as appetizer, main course and dessert on the new piranha’s first day.

  A toad kept in a grass-filled jar that I thought was singing to me with his mouth wide open until my mother told me I’d forgotten to put air holes in the lid.

  My legs take me to a park bench next to the creek that runs below the prison. The sky a glaze of gasoline on the slow water. Slides over the rocks and passes on out of town through the system of connected rivers and lakes to Georgian Bay. I listen for voices in it but there’s only my own, picked up and carried on the water in its constant motion to join itself.

  It was early that October when the Murdoch detachment of the O.P.P. called and said they wanted to ask me some questions. Nothing too serious, no lawyer necessary, no, no, but could I come up sometime soon and have a word? Dad canceled his lecture, I was pulled out of class and both my parents drove me up early the next morning, so that by noon I was sitting in front of a desk with a cop behind it, his face so empty of color that his head appeared as a cheesecloth sack packed tight with rice. Behind him, half sitting on the two-drawer filing cabinet against the wall, a younger cop with a mustache who said less than the older one but whenever he did speak asked the tougher questions. Any problems with handling feelings of aggression? sexual appetites? you’re a good swimmer, right? His crossed arms and the noise he made through his nose after I gave him an answer suggested he believed in a foul-play theory. Believed I was a murderer.

  The interview seemed to go on well into the night but by the time they let me go it wasn’t yet five o’clock and the sun still blanched houses and trees from its position behind low, seamless clouds. My parents were silent as they led me out to the parking lot, my mother offering an uncertain smile but my father too embarrassed for any show of emotion right there on the tidy grounds of the police station. They remained silent for the first part of the trip home, talking only after night had fallen over everything and the green dashboard light turned them into phantoms in the front seat.

  “So, what did they have to say?” my father begins, as though the question had only just occurred to him.

  “Nothing. They just wanted to know about Caroline. How it happened.”

  “And you told them?”

  “The canoe tipped. I tried to save her. She drowned. I told them.”

  “And what now?” my mother asks, turning around to face me. “Is it over now?”

  “Yeah, I think so. They don’t have anything.”

  “Any what, son?” My father, a little too innocently.

  “Evidence,” I say.

  A brief look passes between them and with this the conversation ends. The car rushes south to join the highways that increase in breadth as the city gets closer, two-lanes to four-lanes to six to eight, my mother and father dim silhouettes in the oncoming headlights. Somewhere in there I fall asleep.

  Were there dreams? Did I hear them cry out, or was it the shriek of metal torn by metal? Was I awake or did I only later imagine the suspended moment of impact, of flight and spiraling darkness?

  I’m being lifted up. Careful, orchestrated hands levitating me onto a varnished wood stretcher and strapping my head still to protect me from any further spinal injury. Being asked what my name is and if I could count the number of fingers the paramedic waved before my eyes (four) as they settled me into the back of an ambulance with buffed stainless steel all around. The line of cars stopped in both directions for what seemed several hundred miles. White lights and red lights, not going anywhere.

  A tractor trailer carrying electric blankets to the downtown department stores for the Christmas rush, four cars in front of us when it lost one of its eighteen wheels. Just shredded right off its rim, bounced over the cars ahead to finally bring its two-hundred pounds down against the front windshield. Our car spun out of control, was struck from behind, rolled end over end into the grassy median. The chain reaction caused by our flipping across three lanes resulted in a smoking pileup that was pictured in the Toronto papers the next morning but, “miraculously,” only my mother and father ended up as fatalities. Their son, outside of a few nasty cuts, was fine, partially because his parents’ bodies in the front seat absorbed the better part of the impact. Everyone agreed that it was a tragedy, shook their heads and said no more.

  Then the years of boarding school and holidays with legally obligated aunts and uncles (with the exception of Caroline’s parents, who I was told “thought it best” if I stayed away). All of them doing what they could at first before finally surrendering, feeling that I could have made their jobs a little easier if I’d only made a bit more of an effort, tried to be somewhat more responsive, instead of the unreadable kid who was a cause of great concern to the headmaster who suspected me of ripping the last pages out of novels in the library. But in the end nobody could say much about it, given the nature of the tragedy the boy had endured. So the aunts and uncles addressed their checks to Upper Canada College at the beginning of each term, looked forward to the day the kid headed off to university (thank God his marks were good) and, aside from the annual charade of good-natured congeniality at Christmas, could be left completely to his own devices once and for all. And the whole time the kid looked forward to the very same thing himself, feeling that once he’d gained his own space he could refine all the mechanisms that would allow him to wipe his hands of himself forever.

  On this point, it turned out that hate alone wasn’t enough, although it certainly helped in dealing with the world, the right poses to strike. But hate wasn’t so good with managing the past. What I had yet to discover was the simple fact that the best way to get around memory is to forget. That forgetting is not the absence of memory but a thing in itself, with its own mass, shape and texture. The process calls for initial encouragement but then a standing back to allow it to run its own course. A weed gone wild in the garden that will bring about the death of all other things around it if left alone long enough.

  The more difficult part was to rid the body of memory. The trick is to convince it that it’s not really there. Treat it like a stupid machine and let it rust. Dull it with drink and opiates. Never step on a scale. Avoid mirrors.

  It worked.

  Hadn’t thought of it, any of it, for a long time. Almost two decades of nothing. And now it’s come back out of nowhere. Phoning up in the middle of the night, rising from the water, asking to be held.

  “Evidence,” I say.

  A look that passes between them in the front seat, quick and ashamed.

  Neither of them ever told me they believed me. I never told them she was pulled.

  Sitting next to my father on the arm of his chair and pretending to read the same page he was reading, each word a soldier, each paragraph a battalion following the one ahead of it into war.

  Proposing marriage to Caroline under her father’s billiards table, the twist-tie from a loaf of bread for an engagement ring.

  Carried, asleep, at my mother’s neck.

  I smell the morning before I see it: bagged leaves, pine sap and coffee. Then the gray light you don’t believe at first, pushing color into the shadows. From the block behind me a car refuses to turn over, a screen door whinges open, a child is told to stop it right now and begins to cry. Without raising my eyes the morning lifts up from the sidewalk, the dead grass. Every step slow but sure. My body a solid, living thing in the growing light.

  FORTY-FIVE

  After court the next evening I drive out to the lake once more. Haven’t slept in over twenty-four hours and the full extent of the day’s menu has consisted of something the plastic label called a burrito thrown into a convenience store microwave, but I’m neither tired nor hungry. And it’s not just another cocaine distraction either. It’s those last vapors of burning consciousness, the heightened senses that come just prior to final collapse. I’m aware o
f this as much as I’m aware of the briars reaching and tugging at me across the path, geese honking south overhead, the smoke from Mrs. Arthurs’s fire.

  I sidestep down the slope past her woodpile, around to the front and raise my hand to knock but there’s no need, the old woman already swinging the door open with a nearly toothless show of tonsil and gum.

  “Saw you comin’,” she says, chuckling, as though this fact alone spoke for some ingenious accomplishment. “Been around here quite a bit of late, haven’t you, Mr. Crane?”

  “Just stretching the legs.”

  “Well, well.”

  She waits, but I have no words for her, so she fills the space herself.

  “You want some coffee? There’s some just made.”

  “That would be great.”

  “Get yourself in out of the cold then and have a seat.”

  The choice of seating is limited though, given that there are only two in the entire room and one (an overstuffed recliner shawled in a threadbare Hudson’s Bay blanket) is obviously Mrs. Arthurs’s roost. Sling my overcoat over a wobbly side table (a Queen Elizabeth II glass paperweight atop a sun-yellowed notepad from the Banff Springs Hotel) and take my seat, a pine kitchen chair apparently designed for dwarfs with extremely good posture.

  “Milk? Sugar?” the old woman calls out from around the corner where there’s the rattle of cups and saucers being lowered from the top shelf.

  “Whatever’s going.”

  When Mrs. Arthurs returns she carries a tray bearing two fancy bone china cups (both murky with drops of cream) and a plate of assorted store bought biscuits.

  “Nice of you to drop by. Don’t get many visitors anymore,” she says, placing the tray down upon a footstool and falling into her chair. “Don’t get any visitors anymore, to be honest.”

  “Well I’m not exactly just visiting, Mrs. Arthurs. I’ve come to ask you a favor, as a matter of fact.”

  “I can’t imagine what I could help you with, Mr. Crane.”

  “It involves the case I’m working on. A rather unusual request, actually.”

  Lifts her cup and makes a sound like a vacuum being dunked into a pail of water.

  “Is this about what I was telling you before?” she asks when she pulls the cup away from her lips.

  “No. Not directly, anyway. What I’m here to ask you is to assist me in a matter of evidence.”

  “Cookie?”

  “Thank you, no.”

  The old woman crunches on a slab of shortbread.

  “What I’ve come here to tell you is that I am currently in possession of something that may be incriminating to my own client in this case,” I say. “I’d rather not tell you how I came about it, if it’s all the same to you.”

  A moth hammers against the kitchen window behind me, beats exhausted wings over the glass loud enough that I feel my voice rising to shut it out.

  “I’m asking you to present this evidence to the Crown as though you’ve discovered it yourself.”

  “To lie, you mean,” she says, sliding the back of her hand over her mouth.

  “I suppose. In a manner, yes. To lie.”

  “What sort of evidence would you be talking about?”

  I dig into the outside pocket of my overcoat and pull out the newspaper-wrapped hair, place it on the tray next to my cup and give her a moment to look it over.

  “Hair,” I say.

  “I can see that.”

  “I have reason to believe that it’s the hair of Krystal McConnell and Ashley Flynn. If its DNA matches the hair found in the back of Tripp’s car, it proves that they’re dead, and that they died in this lake.”

  “Doesn’t prove he did it.”

  “No. But it sure doesn’t help him.”

  “And you want me to take this into town and say I found it somewhere?”

  “Washed up on your beach.”

  “So your man will be blamed.”

  “So the interests of justice may be advanced. Perhaps we could think of it in those terms.”

  “Perhaps we could.”

  The old woman considers the round package without distaste, lips pursed. Then she raises her eyes, looks at me as though I too were some kind of inanimate forensic exhibit.

  “Why not give it to them yourself?”

  “Technically speaking, from the point of view of a lawyer’s ethical duty, that would be the right thing to do in situations of this kind. Hand the evidence over to the police and withdraw from the case. But I can’t do that.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because even with this—” I cast my eyes over to the hair “—there isn’t enough evidence to convict him. So if I withdraw, all it would mean is that some other lawyer would be brought in to finish the trial and Tripp would walk. That’s why I have to stay with him.”

  “But if this hair of yours isn’t enough to get your man, why have me give it to the police at all?”

  “It might help me talk to him. Get through. It might be enough for him to see that it’s over.”

  I keep my eyes on her jaw, its mechanical circles and clacks still working the biscuity paste around her mouth.

  “But you know that I think The Lady did it,” she says after swallowing.

  “I’m not saying she didn’t, exactly. But even you said you thought Tripp probably had a hand in it one way or another.”

  “And that’s what you believe?”

  “I’m not sure I believe anything.”

  “Sounds to me like you do. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here, would you?”

  I say nothing to this, and instead take a slurping gulp of coffee so hot it instantly burns. Mrs. Arthurs watches me and rocks in her chair for a moment, its spring hee-hawing beneath her.

  “So why me?” she asks finally. “There’s plenty of others around here who’d like a turn at your man.”

  “That’s true. But I suppose I feel that you and I share something, Mrs. Arthurs.”

  “Oh?”

  “We both know The Lady is real.”

  “How’s that, then?”

  “Just like you. I lost someone too.”

  The rocking stops.

  “That girl,” she says. “The one that drowned.”

  The saucer lifting on its own to meet my cup with a crack of hollow bone.

  “How do you know about that?”

  “I live on this lake, Mr. Crane. And twenty years isn’t so long ago when you get to be my age.”

  Clear my throat to recover from the prickling rush of surprise. Surprise at the fact that this one wrinkled widow, this believer in a dead woman rising from frozen waters, this most senior of citizens who lives outside of census takers, daily newspapers and group aerobic classes, this accidental hermit may be the only person on the planet who knows who I am.

  “Had a feeling it was you,” she says, bringing a self-congratulating index finger to the tip of her nose. “That I’d seen you before. Although you’d only have been a wee fellow at the time. And they called you something else then.”

  “Richard.”

  “Same as your father.”

  “Richard Sr. and Ricky Jr. It was thought of as very cute at the time. Then all the aunties and uncles got together to suggest it might be a good idea for me to change it. After what happened.”

  The old woman considers me long enough that I can feel the space my body occupies shrinking before her.

  “The thinking was it might help save me from being hounded by the press as I got older,” I hear myself saying. “But the fact is the press was never really interested anyway. ‘Girl Drowns While on Holiday’—it happens every week up here in the summers. But now I think I know why they really did it.”

  “And why’s that then?”

  “To help me forget.”

  “Forgive me now, Mr. Crane. But you’d think a son should never have to feel ashamed to carry his own father’s name.”

  “He’s not what I’m ashamed of, Mrs. Arthurs.”

  She pulls hersel
f soundlessly forward in her chair, the fading light from the kitchen window seeping through her hair pale as ash. Strokes a hand down the length of her neck and pulls the skin tight from her chin. For a moment her face becomes a hollow mask. Deep in their sockets, eyes belonging to a stranger behind it.

  “They said you might have been the one,” she says, bland and even. “That you drowned the girl yourself.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  The moth at the window again but softer now. For what might be a minute or two there’s nothing but its last feathery swats against the glass, flipping like dealt cards on the sill.

  “Her name was Caroline,” I say, eyes fixed on a silver cobweb sprayed into the corner above her head. “I think you would have to say we were in love. Or as much as kids can be in love. Kissin’ cousins. But that day out in the canoe I tried to go further and I scared her.”

  “An accident then.”

  “An accident. But accidents have causes.”

  The old woman’s hands lock together into a sleeping spider on her lap.

  “I tried to save her,” I go on as though asked to. “Went down to pull her up but she was too heavy. Or I wasn’t strong enough. Or something. And I remember it was cold, just a couple of strokes down from where the sun touched the surface. So cold it got harder than water, like solid rock.”

  All of Mrs. Arthurs enlarging now, pressed-in eyes brought closer to mine. Below them her fingers awaken to scuttle forward to the ends of her knees.

  “I guess I must have panicked,” I’m saying, the words delicate and moist as popped bubbles. “Didn’t think I had enough air to make it back up. That if I held onto her any longer she might take me down with her. But now I’m not so sure. Maybe I didn’t even try. Not really. Maybe I just gave up.”