Enter, Night

by Michael Rowe

  Thomson said, “McKitrick, is everything all right?”

  “What do you mean, Sarge?”

  “Just what I said. Is everything all right?”

  Elliot looked at him neutrally. “Yeah, everything is fine, Sarge, why?”

  “You seem like you have something on your mind,” Thomson replied. “Anything you want to talk about? Anything bothering you?”

  “No, Sarge,” Elliot said. “Just thinking about that murder in Gyles Point. And about what you just told me, about that crazy guy killing himself in the car in Toronto.”

  Thomson sighed. “OK, McKitrick.” Clearly whatever was bothering him, Elliot would be keeping it to himself for the moment, which was fine. But the next time he disappeared for two hours, Thomson was going to hand him his head. Steering the conversation back to the business at hand, he said, “Have you been back up to the cliffs where you saw . . . well, whatever you saw? Did you check it out?”

  “No, Sarge,” Elliot replied. “I haven’t. No reason to, I guess.”

  “Well, now you have a reason. Why don’t you drive up there and take a look around? Check it out. Just to rule everything out. It’s probably nothing, but it never hurts to be sure.”

  “No, sir. When do you want me to go?”

  Thomson sighed again. As irritated as he had been by Elliot being AWOL this morning for two hours, the tension was coming off the younger man in waves, and it was irritating as hell. Maybe a hike up to Spirit Rock would help him realign his priorities, or at the very least adjust his attitude a bit. The murder at Gyles Point wasn’t officially Thomson’s headache—yet—so he could afford to focus on the stack of paperwork that had been building up on his desk.

  “No time like the present, McKitrick. Shouldn’t take you more than an hour or so, I should think. Just check it out.” He briefly considered joining Elliot, thinking that it had been a while since he’d done that particular hike on a fall morning, before realizing that the prospect of traipsing through the bush this morning on what was likely a make-work mission was entirely without appeal. And it was getting colder outside, too. He was starting to feel the coming winter in his joints, though Thomson wouldn’t have confessed to that under torture. “This time,” he added pointedly. “Keep in touch.”

  “Yes, sir, will do.” Elliot said.

  To Thomson, he sounded relieved. Whatever the kid was going through—girls, or whatever—Thomson hoped he’d get it out of his system soon, because it would become a pain in the ass very quickly if he didn’t.

  Still, as he watched Elliot leave, he was barely aware that, as the father of two daughters and no sons, he was far more fond of the kid than he’d ever admit, even to himself.

  Well before the lunch bell rang, Finn had made his decision. He knew that there was an excellent chance that he’d catch holy hell, and very likely get suspended, but he didn’t care. Sadie was lost and no classroom could hold him this afternoon.

  He’d barely heard anything that his teacher, Mrs. Marshall, had said all morning, though he’d kept a bright, pleasantly neutral expression on his face. Only his eyes, red from crying, would have given any indication that there was something wrong. Since he’d deftly avoided one-on-one contact with anyone else in his class (and because Mrs. Marshall tended not to look too hard at students unless she had to) no one had any idea that he was teetering on the verge of his own personal hell.

  He needed to find his dog, and he needed to find her before something terrible happened to her. There was no one in his life he loved more than Sadie—not even his parents. No one. Sadie was his baby. She was his world.

  When he’d woken his parents that morning, his father was initially irritated—hardly unusual for his father in the morning, especially before he’d had his coffee and locked himself in the upstairs bathroom with the newspaper—but that irritation had quickly turned to a level of concern that stunned and comforted Finn. His father had even driven around the neighbourhood looking for Sadie. Finn had waited by the picture window in the living room for any sign of his father’s car, praying that he’d see Sadie, grinning foolishly in the back seat when he came back. When his father had returned alone, looking frustrated, Finn had burst into fresh tears.

  His mother was almost as frantic as Finn, calling the neighbours on either side to see if, by some miracle, Sadie had wandered into their yards. But even as she did, in between calls, his mother kept muttering,

  “There’s no way she could have gotten out of that yard. No way at all.”

  “Do you think she . . . do you think some sort of animal might have . . .” Finn couldn’t bring himself to finish the thought.

  “Don’t be silly, Finnegan,” his mother said, dialling the next number in her book. “Sadie is too big for an owl or a hawk to have carried her off. And any other animal would have had to get in—and out—with her. She probably found some way to jump the fence.”

  “There was a lot of barking last night,” Finn said hopefully. “Maybe she wanted to join in with the other dogs?”

  “Was there? I slept right through . . . Laura?” his mother said brightly. “Hi, it’s Anne Miller. Good morning! Yes, fine, thank you! Listen, Laura, I’m sorry to bother you, but Sadie’s missing. Yes, I know. I don’t know. Would you mind taking a look in your back yard and see if she’s there?”

  His mother looked up at the ceiling, tapping her fingers along the counter by the wall as she waited for Mrs. Smythe to come back on the line. The finger tapping was something Finn knew she did when she was more upset about something then she wanted to let on. When she spoke again, Finn heard the disappointment in her voice and his heart sank. “No? Isn’t that strange. No, we have no idea. Thanks for looking, though, Laura. Oh, would you? That would be so nice. Yes, I hope she turns up, too. Finn is a little upset. All right, give my best to Al. Yes, goodbye, Laura.”

  “Mom,” Finn said. His bottom lip had begun to quiver. “I want to stay home from school today. I want to look for Sadie.”

  “Finn, there’s nothing you can do. Go get dressed for school. You can look for her when you get home. I’ll call around. I’ll even call the police station and let them know to keep an eye out for her.”

  “Mom, I don’t want to go to school! I want to stay home and look for my dog!”

  “Finn, please.” His mother sighed. “I know you’re upset, but you being upset isn’t going to bring Sadie home any sooner. It’ll all be fine, you’ll see. I’m sure she hasn’t gone far. We’ll find her. I’ll take you out in the car after school and we’ll look together.”

  Finn wanted to shout that his mother didn’t care about Sadie, and if she cared, she’d let him stay home, but he knew that wasn’t true. She did care. He also knew that he was already as upset as he could stand to be, and that a fight with his mother over whether or not he could stay home was a fight he was bound to lose.

  He’d gotten dressed and left for school, Sadie’s red rubber ball tucked into the pocket of his jacket, thinking he could keep it together. By noon, he realized he wasn’t going to be able to do it, because Sadie was all he could think of.

  All morning he’d mentally explored the horror show of possibilities of what might have happened to Sadie—some more realistic than others, but all equally awful.

  He was haunted by one particular image—Sadie wandering, injured, lost in the cliff area around Bradley Lake, perhaps with a broken leg, or worse. Somehow the mechanics of how this might have occurred was less important than the absolute vividness of the image.

  He could see her, as though he were gazing into the Wicked Witch of the West’s crystal ball in The Wizard of Oz, a movie his mother had taken him to in Sault Ste. Marie when he’d been eight, and which had both terrified and thrilled him. One particular scene in the film returned to him now: the scene in the witch’s castle, where Dorothy sees Auntie Em in the crystal ball, plaintively crying out her name, unable to find her. At the time the scene had spoken to him about the terror of loss, of separation from his mother, h
is home, and everything safe. But now it just filled him with dread.

  He pictured Sadie in the crystal ball instead of Auntie Em—lost, hurt, terrified, and looking for Finn to protect her and bring her home. The scene repeated itself in his mind all morning at school until the possibility of sitting in his seat and listening to Mrs. Marshall drone on about the geography of countries he knew he’d never visit made him want to scream.

  When the lunch bell rang, he waited till no one was looking, then climbed the chain-link fence behind the schoolyard and ran like hell along the streets behind the school, heading for Bradley Lake. He’d considered meeting Morgan in their usual spot and telling her that he wouldn’t be able to stay and eat lunch with her today because Sadie was lost and he was going to go look for her, but he realized he didn’t even want to waste the extra ten minutes it would take him to detour to Matthew Browning.

  In truth, Finn was wracked with guilt over his selfishness last night in leaving Sadie out in the yard to fend for herself against whatever had taken her away, just so he could get back to his horny dream about Morgan naked in the lake.

  For a treacherous fraction of a second, he considered blaming Morgan for Sadie’s disappearance, then realized it was his dream, not hers. She’d had no part in it. If there was any blame for abandoning Sadie—and that was what he was now convinced he had done—the blame was Finn’s alone, and he hated himself for it.

  Elliot heard the boy calling for his dog before he saw the flash of his red jacket moving through the yellow leaves.

  He had spent the last hour scouring the ledge area where he thought he’d seen the crouching figure the previous day, but there was nothing at all—none of the usual indicators of passage: no cigarette butts, no obvious footprints, no noticeable disturbances of the foliage and undergrowth. He hadn’t really expected to find them, but he still hoped there would be something there he could tie to the Indian, even tangentially. Nothing would have pleased Elliot more than to nail that smug bastard in such a way that none of his fancy academic credentials and smooth talking would help him out.

  Elliot wasn’t a stupid man, nor was he unaware of the fact that his feelings about Billy Lightning had as much to do with what he represented—like Jeremy, a threat to the established social order of the world with which he’d compacted—as they did with the Indian’s snooty way of talking to him, as though the fact that he was a university professor made him anything more than an Indian or, more to the point, anything more than Elliot himself. Still, even separating all of those variables from the mix, it still seemed a noteworthy coincidence that Billy Lightning should just show up in Parr’s Landing the day after what had happened in Gyles Point, and be talking about murders and crazy people (as it turned out, dead crazy people) and local legends.

  And now, it appeared that what he’d seen had been a trick of the light, after all, or maybe a hiker. Or a kid, like this one who was calling Sadie! Sadie! in a high-pitched, ruptured voice as though he were being broken on the rack.

  Elliot gauged that the kid was about 200 yards directly above him, close to the highest accessible point of the cliffs around the lake. It was a dangerous place for a kid to wander for any reason, and not just because of the ever-present danger of accidentally falling through some grown over mineshaft entrance, but because of the time of day—especially now, at this time of the year when the dusk came so much earlier.

  Elliot turned towards the sound of the kid’s voice and walked towards it. He called out, “Hey, kid! Stay where you are—I’m coming for you. I’m a police officer. Don’t move. It’s dangerous up there. Let’s get you down.”

  He still couldn’t see the kid, but he’d stopped calling for his dog. Elliot figured that he might have startled him, so he called out again, “It’s OK, kid. Just hold on. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Silence answered him. A sharp arrow of late-season Canada geese streaked southward across the sky. The light was burnishing as the late afternoon slouched towards evening. Elliot rounded a sharp turn on the hill and, with three wide steps, he reached the plateau. He vaguely recognized the kid standing there from one of his annual Elmer the Safety Elephant police visits to the primary school, but couldn’t think of his name—Frankie? Fenny? The kid’s face was pale and he’d obviously been crying. His red windbreaker was muddy and there were pine needles in his hair.

  “Hey, kid, you all right?” Elliot said in his best Officer Friendly voice. “What are you doing up here all by yourself?”

  But the kid wasn’t looking at Elliot. He was staring into the opening of a filthy hockey bag—a heavy one, too, judging by the way he was holding it. Even from six feet away, Elliot caught a whiff of something rotten coming from inside it. At the same moment, the kid seemed to smell it, too, and he dropped the bag. It landed on the ground, making a jangling metallic sound as it struck the earth.

  The boy took two steps back, away from the bag. He pointed at it and said, “That’s not mine.” He wiped his hands frantically on the legs of his jeans as though he were trying to scrub them clean.

  “Whose is it?” Elliot’s question was automatic, reflexive. When the kid didn’t answer, but instead kept wiping his hands, Elliot walked over to the bag, knelt down, and pulled open the flaps.

  At first he didn’t know what he was looking at—metal, paper, grease. No, more than just metal. Knives, some hammers. The blades were stained, and there were streaks of red on the T-shirt inside. The stench was awful—old blood, obviously, and something like putrescent raw chicken skin, but also shit and sweat. He moved the bag away from his face and held his breath. When he was sure he wasn’t going to throw up, he took a deep breath of fresh air.

  First and foremost in Elliot’s mind was that this was very likely connected to the murder in Gyles Point. He knelt down and pulled his hand up inside his sleeve, forming a cloth barrier against his hand. It wasn’t gloves, but it was better than touching the bloody knives and catching God-knew-what disease from the stinking T-shirt. He nudged aside the metal and saw that there was a bound typescript underneath. The title page was smeared with blood and dirt, but he was able to read part of it:

  Being the Last True Testament and Relation of Father

  The rest of the text was unintelligible. The paper was warped from exposure to water, the ink smeared and bedaubed with rain and mud. It was a hefty manuscript. He judged there were at least 70 double-spaced typed pages in all. Awkwardly, he nudged the papers with his cloth-covered knuckles, but it was futile. To see more, he was going to have to turn the pages with his fingers, and he wasn’t going to do that without gloves. At the very least, Thomson would kill him for messing up evidence with his own fingerprints.

  Turning his attention to the boy, he said, “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Finn Miller,” the boy replied. “Am I in trouble?”

  “No, you’re not in any trouble,” Elliot said in a reassuring voice. “What are you doing up here? Shouldn’t you still be in school?”

  Finn’s eyes brimmed. “I was looking for my duh-duh-dog,” he said. His eyes spilled over. “My dog is lost. She’s been lost since last night.”

  “Don’t cry, Finn,” Elliot said. “I’m sure your dog is all right. What’s her name?”

  “Sadie,” he replied. Elliot saw that Finn was struggling to regain his composure. He admired the kid for that. “Her name is Sadie.”

  “Is this where she usually likes to play?” he asked. He was consciously easing the conversation so he could ask about the bag without spooking the kid.

  “We were up here a few days ago,” Finn said, glancing around. “Sadie was scared by something up here.”

  “Scared? Scared by what?”

  “I don’t know,” Finn said. “By something. She was really upset. I thought maybe she came back here to . . . I don’t know, to check it out or something.”

  “Is this where you found the bag?” Elliot said calmly. “Right here? Or did you move it?”

  Finn pointed to a cl
ump of rocks and overgrowth a few feet away. “There,” he said. “I found it there.”

  Elliot walked over to the spot and nudged aside some of the branches and broken tree limbs with the toe of his boot. It looked like a crack in the rocks, about four and a half feet long, maybe six inches across. It could be the opening to some sort of animal’s burrow, perhaps, or a snake hole. Nothing out of the ordinary, certainly not somewhere a man could hide. And yet, as he glanced around again, he knew that somewhere the owner of this bag was very likely hiding. For the first time in two days, he reached down to his holster and touched the gun, just to feel its reassuring solidity against his hip.

  “Finn,” Elliot said. “I think you’d better come with me. We can stop off at your house and see your Mom and Dad, and they can come to the police station with us. Is that OK with you?”

  “What’s in the bag? I saw knives and stuff. It sure stinks, too.”

  “Yeah,” Elliot said casually. “Knives and stuff. Probably left behind by a hunter. But we have to make sure it’s all OK and that nobody got hurt up here. Gave you a scare, did it?” Elliot tried to chuckle, but he realized it sounded fake and this kid wasn’t stupid. Elliot knew he would see right through it.

  “I’m not scared by a stupid hockey bag full of knives,” Finn said. “I’m scared about not knowing where my dog is.

  “You said I wasn’t in trouble,” Finn continued. “Right? You said.”

  “Right,” Elliot said soothingly. “You’re not in trouble. It just looks like you might have found something important, and my sergeant would probably like to hear how you found it.”

  “But what about Sadie?” Finn said urgently. “I can’t leave. I have to look for my dog. It’s getting dark. I can’t leave her out here.” He looked around wildly. For a moment Elliot thought he was going to bolt back off into the woods.