The Girl in Saskatoon

by Sharon Butala

  Asphalt has been poured, and the parking lot where I sat is arranged now so that one row of cars may park side by side, noses pointed to the water. The fence is solid brown iron now, and if you go to it and peer down between the fence and the water’s edge, you see that the concrete apron where Alex sat that night is still there, seamed with cracks now, through which green grass and weeds poke their bright heads. Fishing is no longer allowed; no one is allowed to go down onto the apron anymore, and the fence makes it nearly impossible anyway. Far to the left, about a tenth of a mile from the centre of the old apron, the high iron railway bridge has a new, many levelled set of firm, wide steps leading onto it, which invite walkers, and at ground level there are picnic tables and benches and a walking path. The spot on the far side of the bridge where Alex’s body was found cannot be identified now. Somewhere in that greenery above the water she died, and was buried, and then found. There is no way at all for a stranger to know that this is where a beautiful young woman had her life taken from her.

  We are made of stories, it is said; without stories, we don’t exist at all: that time when everybody thought the old “tin bridge” was about to go out in the spring breakup; or when in a sudden downpour the underpass filled with water and a woman’s car stalled and her electric doors and windows wouldn’t open and she drowned; or the time the creamery barn caught fire and thirty horses died; or that strange, scruffy, wild-looking man who rode a bike everywhere for years and years and then one day was gone; or how we all got out of bed one frosty Saturday morning each year and walked down to the civic arena so that we could cheer the east-west elementary school hockey game; or how the big Friday night date used to be to go to a movie at the Capitol Theatre or the old Tivoli. Or that young, beauty-queen-nurse who was murdered and they never caught her killer. These are stories that belong to all of us and that weave us together, give us our sense of belonging, and our sense of home. That there is no separating the city story from the individual story is something I did not know, twenty years ago when I dreamt that dream about the Ukrainian Hall on the west side of Saskatoon, and my diary in it, under glass.

  Perhaps that dream, where all this began for me, had an imperative hidden from me: that one day I would hear about the other diary, the one written by Alex that was burned, and the day that I realized there were two diaries—today, as I write these words—I would feel a completion of the circle of story about two small, quiet, country girls from meagre circumstances who went to the city and, despite the things that happened to them there, and the one dead, and the other far away, never really left it again. And I would feel once again, how we, although mere acquaintances and never close friends, had been linked by circumstance and history, and by memory. As if destiny had decided what would happen: she would die a terrible death and receive no justice, and I would be a writer and try to write her story into permanency, whether or not her killer was ever caught. That, I think, is the prophecy of my dream of twenty years ago and of the two diaries which have become one, melding two girls’ lives in story.

  The brick I took that day from the pile of rubble that had been our school sits on my desk. In this early morning light, the sky cloudy, it is oddly transformed and faded, the sharp edges gone, the harshness smoothed. Finely and shallowly ribbed on three sides in a muted grey, up close I see that what I have called yellow is a rich cream, and yet most of the edge that would be visible in a building has been discoloured, or more likely, designed to change in the firing to a warm shade somewhere between peach and pink. A work of art was this brick, and I wondered if that was why it broke our hearts to see the building reduced to trash by wrecking ball and bulldozer. I cherish that brick as a representative of our precious youth, Alex’s and mine, when we traipsed every day to that big, yellow-gold building on the riverbank that stood under the shade of the maples and elms, where we dreamed our dreams of a future full of love, adventure, and happiness, and the whole world seemed to be waiting to embrace us.

  Epilogue

  A couple of years ago at a retreat-resort centre, I had the good luck, by virtue of standing next to him in the line, to have an intimate breakfast with a famous Zen monk. He said to me, during our conversation, “I always wanted to be a poet.”“Oh?” I said, and we went on to talk a bit about the writerly impulse. But when he had said that, unexpectedly, as if from some source other than myself, so that I was partly stunned by it even as we spoke quietly together about other things, what had popped into my head had been, I always wanted to be alive.

  I had hoped that this book would end with the name of Alex’s killer, and the news of his capture and incarceration, and with all the details of that night, the motives, the passion laid bare at last. So, in late 2006, just as I had finished writing this story, I was thrilled when something happened that I thought would at last make it possible for me to say the killer’s name. I received a letter from the daughter of the sixteen-year-old boy who had been fishing at the weir that night, Billy McGaffin, who had been hypnotized by Dr. Brand and who had said under hypnosis that he had seen two cars there that night.

  His daughter told me that her father—long divorced from her mother—had died in 1998 in Manitoba, but even more startling to one who had read every syllable printed on the subject of that night, she said that her father’s younger brother, then twelve years old, had been with him at the weir that fateful night. I had wondered (and concluded that it was a mistake) why the CBC documentary had shown five boys at the weir when I’d thought that there was one boy—Billy—fishing on Alex’s right, and the two boys who’d been behind her, gazing longingly down at her, and who, one of them had told me, didn’t even know until the police told them, that the first boy was from their class at school.

  But Angela’s uncle, when she asked him to tell her about her father being implicated in a murder, told her that the police had continued to visit him, asking him questions over and over again about that night, and about his older brother’s actions. It seems obvious that the police had always suspected Billy. I remember that at one point in my questioning, I had wondered seriously if the police had considered her father as a suspect, but because he was so young, and because there was no hint in the newspapers or from any other of my sources that he had been anything but a valued witness, I had dismissed that idea. That he was a redhead was always mentioned, though, which should have told me something, but in my inexperience, failed to put me on the alert. I knew now, having discovered it late in this process, that that had to be because red or reddish hair had been discovered on Alex’s body or clothing (although when I finally saw the RCMP lab report, I could find no mention of such hair). The 2004 CBC documentary, too, had described him as a suspect at first, but said that under hypnosis he had “all but cleared himself”—and I had taken that as the final word.

  His daughter went on to write that, “Along with my mom & brother, I gave a DNA sample in the summer of 2004.” (That was the same summer that I visited Alex’s grave with my bouquet of deep red roses, and discovered that her remains had been disturbed.) She also wrote that since they had given their DNA samples, two years or so earlier, they had heard not a word from the police. But, she explained, the Saskatoon police officer who had taken her family’s samples had told her that they were taking those of many suspicious people and contacts, and that when all were gathered, they would send them together to a certain lab for testing. She had written that she guessed that that would take a long time.

  I called her by phone as soon as I had read and reread her letter, but she had gone away for the weekend, her phone wasn’t working properly either, and it was three endless days before I heard from her. When we finally spoke, she told me that until the time of the DNA sample, she and her brother had known nothing at all about the cloud of suspicion that had been hanging over their father ever since that night in 1962, and she doubts that her mother knew either. She was thoroughly shocked, she said, and it took her a while to get a grip on this information and to begin to think about i
t in a rational way, and then she had wanted to know more about that night, she had wanted to know everything.

  She had been living in England, she said, when a friend who had seen the documentary, Death of a Beauty Queen, sent her a copy of the videotape. Unfortunately, the tape was damaged and she had been able to recover only the soundtrack, not the picture. She said she’d wanted to phone me from the moment she heard the tape and recovered from the shock of discovering that her own father had been—still was—a murder suspect, but had thought that I would think she was simply crazy. But finally she had decided to take the risk and write to me. I said that I would make a copy of the tape and try sending it to her again.

  At first, on hearing this news from the suspect’s daughter, I was merely excited, feeling that at last I had a grip on the missing piece of the mystery. And yet, I told myself, I’d always known there were suspects, I just didn’t know who they were. Surely, knowing now who one of them was didn’t change anything. But by the morning after Angela and I had finally had our long, excited conversation—she was dying for details about the story, and I was dying to know about her father—I was beginning to feel quite differently about this new development. I decided to view the documentary one more time.

  It showed five boys, and I could, even now, only account for four who had been there that night, and I thought that if Billy had been pursued by the police until his death, and his brother’s presence had been kept a forty-four year secret, then two of the three remaining boys were probably on the suspect list too. Although I had the name of one, I had never even tried to talk to him, and I had no idea who the fifth boy was (if, indeed, there had been a fifth boy). The man who had been the third boy had called me and we had talked several times; he said he’d never been contacted by the police since the day he’d gone to the station to tell them he’d seen Alex that night, nor had he been asked for his DNA. I reasoned that if he was not a suspect, then the friend who’d been with him that night probably never was either—this, I supposed, was because neither of them was a redhead. But who, then, was that other figure?

  I’d had a long, sleepless night, trying to figure out where the information from Angela fit into my book, if it fit at all, or if it was just another story to add to the many stories I’d already recounted. I woke depressed when I should have been tense with excitement: I should have been holding all my emotions in abeyance as I waited for the news of the DNA results. But instead, as the morning wore on I grew more depressed, until I was unable to write, and eventually found myself near tears. Partly because now I had more material to use and would have to go back and figure out if it changed everything or it changed nothing or somewhere in between, and already this book had exhausted me. I had said to my editor, This book will be the death of me; I didn’t know if I would be able to find the stamina, or even more lethally to such an effort, the desire to revise it yet another time.

  As the morning wore on, however, I knew my reaction to be something more profound than mere exhaustion at the possibility of having to do yet another tinkering with my book, yet I could not quite divine what it was. I saw now that I had been deceived, one way or another, over and over again, deceived by omission, mostly, and by people I had believed in absolutely, all that long time ago, believing in their integrity, and in their desire to find justice for Alex. And now I saw that everybody had turf to protect, everybody had kept secrets; they had kept secrets from each other, and from me, and most of all, I was beginning to think, from themselves. For a while I thought that this had to be the source of my deep unease, and I thought that sooner or later I would just get over it.

  It was only a week or so later that Angela sent me a copy of the e-mail her family had received from a Saskatoon police officer, which stated, to her family’s huge relief, that the comparison of DNA samples had fully and completely exonerated her father. I was not exactly surprised, and I was truly happy for Billy McGaffin’s family, who by then had suffered over this possibility for a long time, had had their lives turned upside down by it, had had to rethink everything they knew about their father and their mutual past. How very hard that must have been. It made no difference to my book that he was not the killer; I had tried to write it about something other than who the killer was. But still, I remained deeply troubled by this whole development, and I could not put my finger on the reason.

  I told myself glumly that despite this interlude of high drama, I was back where I had started, meaning that I was back at the moment before I tore open Angela’s letter and read the startling news. But now I realized that I could never go back to where I had been, not to that moment when my book was nearly finished and I didn’t know the names of any of the suspects, and I certainly couldn’t go back to however many years ago, when I started this long search. It all had taken too much out of me, it had shown me too much about my home, this place so far from the capitals of the world, and by their standards of complexity and sophistication, so simple. There would be no going back. And I could not seem to extricate myself from that black river of emotion that carried me on and on, tugging at me, as if to drown me, and that would not let me go. What else to do but walk the frozen fields as winter began its freezing, white assault, sounding the depths of this river as I walked, searching for its source?

  It was then that, despite my efforts to focus on my problem, I found myself thinking about the monk with whom I’d had that breakfast a couple of years earlier. I was remembering, especially, how strange it had been to talk to him—strange and beautiful—because he had managed to defeat the guile that seems to be virtually inborn in all of us. By guile, I mean that wall we put between our true responses and the facade we show the world—varying from that of mere “good manners” to deliberate deceptiveness and attempts to manipulate. It seemed that through solitude, contemplation, chanting, meditating, and through focusing on other things, and at great cost, he had dissolved all his personal guile; he had found his way back to his true self.

  I thought, suddenly, this is what this is about—“this” being my near-despair, or whatever emotion it was that had reached so deeply into me that I couldn’t work, couldn’t make sense of anything. It was not just that I had fallen into despair when I discovered the endless guile of even good human beings, even those who had also truly wanted the best for Alex. That was bad enough: the impossibility of ever finding out “the truth” of what had happened to Alex—but that was not the only source of my despair.

  I was thinking back to that conversation with the monk mostly because of that surprising thought I’d had when I was talking to him—the one about wanting to be alive. I suppose that I’d meant by that that I had always felt myself to be passively standing on the sidelines, while other people, with what seemed to me to be both utter recklessness and sometimes profound courage, went out and did things and lived. And I had supposed that if they were not necessarily happier for this, or better people, or wiser, they had at least felt—well, I couldn’t name what it was, except to say life or Real Life coursing through their veins. They had known what it is to be a part of it, while I had not.

  That is, until I had taken notice of Alex’s story, and then, resisting all the way, I backed into telling it, denying even as I did it that I was serious. As resistance to my questioning grew—a nasty interview with an RCMP staff sergeant; a woman screaming in the background as I spoke on the phone to someone else, Don’t talk to her; a phone tap; the certainty that the police were following me; the strong suspicion that a stranger was listening electronically to one of my interviews, and other scary incidents that I haven’t put into this book—perplexed, a bit frightened, filled with both wonder and disgust, I had laid a complaint (specifically about the tapping of my phone) at the door of the director of a high-level body governing police matters in our province.

  I thought that he was probably taping our interview—by then I had learned to be wary—and so, at first, I conducted myself with a good bit of guile (even as I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t g
oing to be able to keep it up). But our conversation was close to an hour long, and near the end, this tired-looking, undistinguished-appearing, middle-aged man leaned toward me, and even as I left my guile behind (as I had known, with intense exasperation at myself, that I would wind up doing), I saw the intensity now appearing in what had been his mild eyes, how hard he had begun to study me, and I noticed that under the neat striped shirt he was wearing, the sleeves rolled to below his elbow, his shoulders and arms were muscular and strong-looking. If I had conducted myself with guile, not wanting to reveal anything to him, he had clearly done the same, wanting me to think him a harmless, pleasant bureaucrat.

  And what had I said to him, when both of us abandoned our guile? I had said, “I won’t stop asking questions.” I had said, meeting his gaze with my own intensity, “I am a writer. This is what writers do.”

  By struggling to find Alex’s story and to tell it, I had entered the stream of life that had always evaded me, that my own fears had kept me from. Alex herself had awakened me, her beautiful promise, her terrible death, her rage at having life snatched from her, her determination that her story would be told. Alex herself had thrust me into life at last. What I had found there had changed me forever. Now it seemed to me that darkness was creeping up, that there was no holding back that black tide of human culpability, human self-interest, human negligence and blindness and self-deception. Of human evil. The real world, it turned out, is almost too terrible to contemplate. All of this was why, after I’d read and absorbed the letter from the daughter of the man who’d been a suspect, I had slowly fallen into that darkness of spirit.

  I had wanted only to tell Alex’s story, her whole story, accurately, once and for all. Now I saw, too, that that was, and had always been, a hopeless task. The story had grown, year after year, it had rippled out farther and farther from Saskatoon, engaging more and more people, even into the next generation of women—including Angela, whose life had been turned upside down by the news of this long-ago murder—until the beginning and the end and the various middles were hopelessly confused, hopelessly complex, hopelessly compromised. If I felt desperate now, it was because, among other things, I saw at last that there truly is no straight line through this story, a neat beginning, a comprehensible middle, a tidy, satisfying end. I saw that the story was not even the one I had thought it was, not the one I had been trying so hard for so long to tell. The story was, instead, about story.