by Michael Rowe
“Christina, do you think . . . I mean, would you like to have dinner sometime while I’m here? You know,” he said, “just to hear some more horrible Wendigo stories, if nothing else?”
“Billy—things aren’t very good at the house right now,” Christina said. She saw the disappointment in his face and kicked herself for being the cause of it. “My mother-in-law is a difficult woman.”
“I know,” he said. “I remember.”
“You remember?” She frowned. “What do you mean, you remember? You know my mother-in-law?”
“No, not personally,” he said. “But she gave my father a pretty hard time about permits in 1952, when he was setting it up. I know they spent some time together that summer at the beginning of the dig. He didn’t ever talk about it so I assume it was more of the same.”
“She’s not an easy woman to get along with. And we’re on tenterhooks up there at the house. My brother-in-law, Jeremy, has a difficult relationship with her, as well.”
“I understand,” Billy said, feeling embarrassed for having put her in the position of turning him down, let alone for having put himself out on a limb like this. “Don’t give it another thought.”
After they had shaken hands and parted, each went about their own particular business, Billy walking back to the motel to change into his hiking gear, and Christina aimlessly circling the town limits of Parr’s Landing in the Chevelle to delay her inevitable return to the house. Both were surprised that each could still feel the other’s hand in theirs. For his part, Billy had memorized her face and heard her voice in his head as he walked.
Christina felt only that she was the tiniest bit less vulnerable since Jack’s death and her arrival in Parr’s Landing, and that Jack would have really liked and trusted Billy Lightning.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
At the moment Billy Lightning and Christina Parr went their separate ways, Elliot McKitrick was parking his cruiser behind the Parr’s Landing police station in his accustomed spot. The distance between the Pear Tree and the police station was less than five minutes, but when he’d left the café, he was too angry to get back to work, so he did what he always did when he was angry—he drove.
He circled the town limits once, twice, three times. As he was about to go around a fourth time, it occurred to him that the visibility of the cruiser was making him conspicuous to anyone who happened to look up as he drove, loop after unvarying loop, along the same route. He turned the cruiser towards the town limits and drove out in the direction of Bradley Lake and the cliffs.
His town was suddenly getting far too small for his comfort. With Jeremy Parr in Toronto all these years, and the past . . . well, in the past, he’d made a good life for himself in Parr’s Landing. He commanded respect. It wasn’t an exciting life, but all Elliot had ever wanted to be was normal. Now, he was normal. And he occupied exactly the echelon he wanted to occupy, and no one challenged it.
Now, in a matter of days, the entire structure of his world seemed under attack from all sides. This mouthy, jumped-up Indian—whom, he’d just realized, he actually hated—was challenging his authority and had actually threatened him—an Indian had threatened him. Jeremy Parr was back in town trying to stir up the past, Elliot’s past. It didn’t occur to Elliot to think of it as Jeremy’s past, too, because Jeremy had gotten away, leaving Elliot to do all the work of self-recreation and the rewriting of his—their—history. Even Jack Parr’s girlfriend, Chris—his wife, or widow, whatever she was—was back in town. It had been obvious from the cold tone she’d taken with him that Jeremy had gone home last night and cried on her shoulder about what had happened between them at O’Toole’s. Typical. So she knew, too.
A sudden thought occurred to Elliot. What if she told the Indian?
He’d seen them talking through the window of the Pear Tree as he drove off. What if she’d inclined her head towards the Indian and said, “Don’t worry about that cop—he’s a fag. He and my brother-in-law had a ‘thing’ ten years ago, and as you may have heard, the cop never married anybody.” What if she’d laughed at the point, laughed with high, shrill insight—and what if the Indian had joined her in her laughter at his expense, promising to himself that the next time Elliot crossed his path, he was going to let Elliot know exactly what he knew and threaten him again, this time with the one thing that truly terrified Elliot—exposure? His knuckles on the wheel of the cruiser were white. Elliot made a sound somewhere between a sharp intake of breath and a soft yelp, startling himself. For a moment, all he heard was the sound of his own heartbeat and the blood thundering in his temples.
Elliot pulled over to the side of the road and waited until his heartbeat slowed down and his breathing returned to normal. He opened the driver’s side door and stepped out into the cold late-morning sunlight and took a deep breath, then another. As he did, his vision cleared and he felt the panic recede.
The sword cut both ways, he realized. Jeremy wasn’t back in town to threaten him. Jeremy was back in town because Chris needed him there. The Parrs didn’t want another scandal. Old lady Parr had sent Jeremy to a lunatic asylum. She’d threatened Elliot’s old man with ruin if he didn’t beat a lesson into Elliot that he’d never forget. The cuts had healed, but the feel of the whip cutting through his clothes into his flesh was one Eliot would never forget.
No, whatever else was going to happen, there would be no concerns about exposure from the Parrs, any of them. They had as much to lose as he did, scandal-wise. No way was Mrs. Parr going to let either Jeremy or Chris make any trouble for him.
The thought comforted him, and slowly Elliot grew calm again. The wind suddenly came up and the trees around him shivered,
releasing clouds of orange and red leaves against the hard blue sky. Elliot shielded his eyes against the sunlight with his fingers and watched the leaves blow away across the treetops towards Bradley Lake.
In fairness to Jeremy, there had been nothing threatening or angry in his demeanour last night at O’Toole’s. On the contrary, Jeremy had shown traces of the very gentleness and vulnerability that had drawn Elliot to him in first place when they were boys, so many years ago. Last night, Elliot had tried to hurt Jeremy, to drive him away. He’d succeeded in hurting him, but Jeremy hadn’t been angry at all. There had been nothing in his eyes but a terrible sadness that Elliot had tried very hard not to see.
But he had seen it, even if last night he told himself he hadn’t. And at that moment, in his privacy by the side of the road, with nothing around but the reddened forest and the cliffs of Spirit Rock in the distance, he could admit it.
Perhaps if Jeremy had been angry, if he’d shown Elliot hatred instead of that terrible gentleness, Elliot would have been able to get it up for Donna Lemieux right away instead of failing, for the first time in his life, to get wood until he did her from behind.
He realized that the thought should disturb him, but he found himself smiling instead. To think of Jeremy and to smile felt good. The muscles of his face relaxed. He hadn’t realized he’d been clenching his jaw until he unclenched it and released all the tension he’d been holding there. He felt the release of that tension spread to every part of his body. He breathed in the cold air easily and deeply. He’d give Jeremy a call this evening, or drive up to Parr House, and talk it out. There was no reason why they shouldn’t be friends, or at least on some sort of conversational terms. They were just a couple of guys who had been good friends once a long time ago—OK, maybe a bit more than friends, maybe, but it was a long time ago. Then was then and now was now.
Elliot climbed back into the car and turned the key in the ignition. He needed to get back to the station and back to work. He was a cop. There would be time for all this personal crap later.
On his way back into town, Elliot passed Donna Lemieux’s plain white house on house on Hobbs Street and felt a stab of guilt. On a whim, he pulled into her driveway. He’d been an asshole to her last night as well as to Jeremy Parr. Fixing the Jeremy situation was going t
o take some time, but an apology, some charm, and some reassurance of her desirability would go a long way towards making things right with Donna. Elliot prided himself on being a hard-ass, but he’d never thought of himself as an asshole, and didn’t plan to start now. He wished he’d brought flowers, but realized immediately what an idiotic thought that was.
Elliot pulled into her driveway and got out. Instinctively he looked both ways to see if anyone had seen him. A police car parked in someone’s driveway was a universally acknowledged symbol of trouble in the neighbourhood and the last thing he wanted to do was compound last night’s romantic disaster by embarrassing Donna, making her a spectacle to her neighbours. But there was no one in the street, and no one was peering at him from behind the curtains, at least so far as he could tell.
He knocked on her door and waited. Then, receiving no answer, he knocked again, more loudly. He glanced over his shoulder to where her car sat in the driveway. She’d left his place at—what, three-thirty in the morning? Four? She’d obviously driven home in one piece because the car was right there. Had she gone out already? Not likely. Not without the car. He knocked again, and peered in through her front window. The living room beyond the window was dim. There was no movement at all.
She’s sleeping , Elliot thought practically. She came over to my house after a night shift and probably didn’t get back here till four a.m. And she was pissed. She’s probably sleeping, and the last thing I want to do is wake her up and have her answer the door with her hair all messy and her face puffed up and give me shit for waking her up, on top of everything else.
Elliot walked back to the cruiser. He glanced back over his shoulder at the silent white house with the dark windows. A thought came and went so quickly that he barely registered it as a thought before dismissing it: the thought that the house felt empty to him. No, not just empty— absent of life.
It was an irrational thought—emotional, illogical, very unlike Elliot the police officer, therefore, in his mind, very unlike Elliot, period. His rational, logical thought, on the other hand, was that Donna Lemieux was inside, sleeping like the dead, after a rough night for which he was at least partly to blame. That was reality. He would drive out to O’Toole’s tonight and make amends. Maybe even bring flowers. Perhaps flowers would seem like a better idea once the sun had gone down.
Elliot sighed again, thinking in abstract terms that having a conscience was a burden he hadn’t had to consider until very recently, and one he could happily do without.
He got back into the cruiser and drove to the station as quickly as he could, realizing that nearly two hours had passed since his encounter with Christina Parr and Billy Lightning, and he was going to have to think on his feet if he was going to come up with a plausible excuse for Sergeant Thomson as to where the hell he’d been all morning.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sergeant Thomson was sitting at his desk, talking on the telephone, when Elliot walked through the door of the Parr’s Landing police station. He looked up irritably and motioned with his hand for Elliot to sit down. The gesture pushed Thomson’s coffee cup perilously close to the edge of the desk. Elliot lunged forward and grabbed the coffee cup just before it pitched over the edge of the desk. Pleased with himself for this act of minor heroism, he grinned and mimed relief. Elliot whispered, “Whew!” but Thomson was jotting down notes on a pad of paper and didn’t even look up.
“You say the yard was secure? Right, of course. Well, you know how some dogs are. What kind did you say he was? She, sorry. A Lab? Well, was she in heat? Spayed. OK, I see. Well, maybe . . . no, I don’t know. But we’ll definitely keep an eye out. Of course. No, I wouldn’t worry. Yes, we’re going out a bit later. We’ll do a loop of the town and take a look. Yes, I promise. Of course. Yes, it’s hard. Had one myself when I was a boy. Yes, they do, don’t they? All right Mrs. Miller. Thanks. We’ll let you know. All right. Bye, now.” Then, to Elliot: “Where the hell have you been? The phone has been ringing off the hook. What the hell happened last night? Was it a full moon?”
“Sorry, Sergeant,” Elliot lied, thinking fast on his feet. “Someone thought they heard guns up at the lake. I thought, hunters. Didn’t see anything.”
Thomson was brusque. “Never mind, I don’t care. OK, aside from the call I just took from some woman about her son’s lost dog, I also had a call from the mother of that waitress from O’Toole’s—Donna something. Donna Lemieux.”
Elliot froze. “What about Donna Lemieux? What happened to her?”
“What happened? Nothing, probably. Her mother went to her house this morning and she wasn’t there. I told her—nicely—that it’s not suspicious for someone not to be at home during the day. Her car was in the driveway, too, according to her mother, so she probably went out with friends or something. Her mother said she had ‘a feeling about it’ and wanted us to know. Mothers, Jesus.”
“We all have them,” Elliot said automatically, treading water. “Did she say anything else?”
“Just that she went into her daughter’s house and said it didn’t look like she’d slept there last night.”
“But the car . . .”
“That’s what I told her. The car is in the driveway. All we can do is wait and see what develops. I’m sure it’ll be nothing. It’s too early to raise the panic alarm at this point. Besides, we have other things to think about. Early this morning I was talking with my contact at the RCMP in Toronto. Surprise, surprise—Dr. Lightning’s story about his father’s murder and the fact that he thinks it was committed by that student of his father’s—the crazy one, Weal—just got a bit more complicated.”
“Oh, yeah? How so, Sergeant?” Elliot hoped that the forced neutrality of his tone had effectively camouflaged his relief at the fact that they had moved on, away from the minefield topic of the possible disappearance of Donna Lemieux.
“According to the RCMP, Richard Weal is dead,” Thomson said. “Has been for a bit less than a year now.”
“Dead?”
“Dead as a damn doornail,” Thomson said. To Elliot, he sounded more satisfied than bemused. Maybe the Indian had pissed him off, too, more than Elliot had realized. “Car-over-the-cliff crash, apparently. Suicide. In January of this year. A car went off the Scarborough Bluffs in Toronto. They found a pile of clothing and Weal’s identification. Neat little folded pile, just like a crazy person would do on a bloody cold winter night. He must have gotten into the car naked and just driven it over the edge, right onto the beach. Metro Police in Toronto said the body inside the wreck was pretty burned up, but the I.D. was right there on top of the pile of clothes. Old I.D.,” he added. “From the time when he was locked up in the loony bin, years ago. But it was definitely him. Metro said it was an open-and-shut case, once they contacted the nuthatch where he’d been locked up. His doctors said they weren’t surprised.”
Elliot said, “So where does this leave the Indian’s story?”
“Well,” Thomson said. “I’m thinking we can pretty much put the notion of Richard Weal running around committing murders in Gyles Point and roaming around Parr’s Landing to rest. Whoever did that to that old man on the Point, it wasn’t Richard Weal.”
Elliot paused for a moment. “Sarge?” he said.
“What?”
“Sarge, the other day I was out at Bradley Lake looking around.”
“So?”
“So,” he said. “I think I saw something.”
“You think you saw something? You think you saw something, or you saw something?”
“No, I did see something,” Elliot said firmly. “Up by the cliffs. It was a man, I think. Prowling up on the ledges. I thought it was a kid, or some hikers or something. I didn’t really think anything of it at the time.” Not strictly true, Elliot admitted to himself. It spooked me something fierce. “I’m just wondering if . . .”
“If what?” Thomson said impatiently. “Come on, McKitrick, get to the point.”
“Well, in light of this new development, m
y question is, why is the Indian in Parr’s Landing, and isn’t it kind of a coincidence that he arrives here with some story about a guy who just so happens to be dead, right around the time that somebody commits a murder a few miles from here?”
“Still nothing solid connecting Billy Lightning to what happened at Gyles Point,” Thomson said. “And the assumption is that there was a murder, but we can’t rule it a murder since there’s no body,” Thomson said. “The dead man wasn’t connected with either Lightning, his father, or Weal—Weal, who we now know to be deceased. As far as the law is concerned, Billy Lightning may be an odd duck, but he’s not a criminal. Not yet, anyway.”
“Something doesn’t add up here,” Elliot said stubbornly. “I just feel it. I feel it in my bones that there’s something wrong here.”
“There could be something wrong, but until there’s some evidence, there isn’t anything I can do. Look, Elliot,” Thomson warned. “I know you don’t like Dr. Lightning, but I don’t want you jumping any guns, or making any accusations you can’t back up that are going to come back and bite you—or me—in the ass. The man’s a professor; he’s not just some random vagrant. Be careful.”
“But—”
“If you find something solid, we can move on it,” Thomson said with finality. “Until then, hands off. I don’t want any problems.”
Elliot remembered Lightning’s threat to him that very morning and kept his mouth shut.
Thomson’s own instincts, honed over many more years of police work than Elliot’s, signalled to him that there was something going on, not with Billy Lightning, but with Elliot himself. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a couple of days, and there was a sullenness and a tension to the younger man that was entirely alien to his character as Thomson knew it. Disappearing for two hours under some bullshit pretext of looking for illegal hunters wasn’t like Elliot McKitrick at all. He wasn’t dating anyone in particular, as far as Thomson knew, which more or less ruled out woman trouble. But then again, who knew? Something was very clearly bothering the younger man.
