“Nobody was ever arrested?” Jeremy asked.
“Nope. Some people came forward who had been in the park around that time and thought they saw a woman with two little kids, a boy and a girl. The cops did a country-wide search for anybody who knew about a brother-sister set gone missing. Sifted through hundreds of tips. Didn’t amount to much. Which might be explained by the fact that a couple years ago DNA testing proved the kids were brothers.”
Jeremy nodded. “But the bodies. Not there any more.”
“I once heard rumours but it’s urban legend stuff. They dug up the skeletons and took them to the morgue. That’s generally what cops do, as opposed to leaving them lying around.”
The woman returned with a thick brown envelope. Gil wished him luck and wheeled off to the elevators.
In a nearby carrel he hefted the large manila folder, which was tied shut with waxed string wound around two paper discs. Inside, there were dusty newspaper clippings stacked in sequence. At the bottom of the pile there was also a sheaf of pages with handwritten notes. A dozen messy pages. Almost indecipherable. Still, he leafed dutifully through the pages, moistening his thumb as he went, words slipping past unread. When he reached the last page, he realized he hadn’t processed a single sentence and felt honour-bound to read the last words in full. They read:
I will remember the following strange words: “… meant to be together. Just as the two were drawn from the same soil, so too must the same soil hold them, and through it must they be reconciled.”
The others are drawn to his vigilance.
Jeremy shook his head, baffled. It could mean anything. He yawned and ran a finger down the envelope’s contents list. The newspaper articles were neatly listed. No mention of the handwritten notes. So that was it, he decided, nodding. The latter-day addition of some random nutcase.
He started at the top of the pile of newspaper articles, grateful for the frank broadsheet English. There were still gaps in the story, large unknowns, but over the years an accepted frame had fallen around the newspaper account of the Babes in the Wood. Two children, maybe five or six years old, brutally murdered. The decayed bodies were discovered by city parks workers in 1953. Over an unfocused picture of a clearing in a forest, The Province had superimposed a cutout photo of the murder weapon, found at the scene. It was a rough, two-headed axe, one head the conventional vertical blade, the other a square mallet. Other articles confirmed that the weapon was a lather’s adze and that it matched the broken opening in each of the skulls perfectly. Also found at the scene: a woman’s fur coat and a single red loafer.
The murderer’s trail, however, was long cold. Police searched fruitlessly for further clues, learning little that wasn’t evident at the crime scene until the appearance of one Miss Harker.
Jeremy’s finger, tracing down the newspaper column, had just reached a large pencil star in the margin next to the words: The Witness.
A young woman—a girl, really—she was only sixteen at the time. But she had been in Stanley Park on October 5, 1947, and had seen a woman with two kids (a boy and girl, she thought) and then, sometime later, without. She hadn’t thought of it further until those six years had passed, the parks workers made their grisly discovery and the story first hit the press. Her family had since moved to Toronto, but she read the news accounts and contacted the Vancouver City Police. She told them what she had seen that day. It dated the murder, but in the end, provided no substantial lead.
Perhaps as a result of this frustration, an accepted theme had developed in the small body of Babes in the Wood literature. The articles were inevitably printed in October, the anniversary month, and most of these cast the murder as an at-once tragic and inaugural event in the city’s history. For Vancouver, the first of the self-inflicted wounds North Americans would come to associate with late-twentieth-century urban life. Murder, burglary, arson, carjacking, child abduction, rape, stalking, the drive-by and the home invasion … all these would follow. But the murder of those two children ushered this unsettling aspect of modernity onto the stage of Canada’s third city, quiet at that time in its West Coast rain forest. Gently dozing in the mists that rolled in off the as-yet toxin-free and salmon-filled ocean. And thinking of it each year, or more accurately every ten years or so, the press in Vancouver would disinter the tale. The journalists would open their articles sounding as perplexed as they had been the first time. They would run over the tragic facts, grafting on the pale analysis of sociologists or psychologists or members of the still-stymied Vancouver City Police Unsolved Crime Unit. And they would finish as perplexed as they began, as perplexed as they would be for Octobers stretching into the future. Flipping from article to article, Jeremy was forced to consider a calendar of civic passage, guilt and confusion, tracing itself up through the decades.
“Interesting,” said Jeremy aloud. Then, conscious of the time, he slapped shut the file folder and returned it to the librarian.
He walked briskly down into Crosstown. The sky was high, and there were ragged clouds moving rapidly seaward despite the breeze being light on his face.
Jeremy was filled with two contradictory feelings. One was tangled excitement about having something to report back to his father. The other was anxiety, which pulled him to a jog as he descended the steep part of Homer Street. A feeling that only resolved to relief when he rounded the corner onto Cambie and saw The Monkey’s Paw façade. He stopped in the street, opposite, and admired it as if it had been resurrected from the ashes.
“Some tea?” Miss Harker had suggested.
The Professor was thinking about tea, having just tried to make the salal-berry variety. He was thinking that this was one of Caruzo’s innovations that didn’t work terribly well—it stained his lips dark purple and tasted like hot water for the effort—when the memory of Miss Harker coursed through him.
“Cookies?” she had pressed.
He had declined her tea and cookies at first, but she firmly re-offered. A twig of a woman with a stubborn streak and an unblemished memory of the day. If they were going to talk about this matter, she was saying in effect, they were going to have a nice cup of tea and a biscuit while doing so. He settled into one of the plastic-covered couches in her front room.
“We read about it in The Toronto Star,” she told the Professor when she returned with the tray. “ ‘Babes in the Wood.’ From our little Vancouver. It was horrifying.”
There had been the press to remind her thereafter. Newspapers tracked her down and phoned from across the country. There had been interest from a television show at one point, years later. She turned them down.
He was her first professor, she had told him. Psychology, was it?
“Anthropology,” he said. And to explain his interest in her version of the story: “A farmer touches the earth in his fields. He thinks, This land is mine. A person in the city too, they walk their favourite streets, they visit their favourite parks.”
Miss Harker nodded with recognition.
“Others are homeless, unrooted by choice or force,” the Professor continued. “I know a man without a home who lives in a place where other people park their cars. He knows his city like no other person, from the inside out and at all hours. But he cannot let himself attach to any one square foot of it more than any other. He cannot afford it.”
Miss Harker nodded with a little less certainty.
The Professor sipped his salal-berry tea, remembering her hesitation. He dabbed his mouth with the edge of his sleeve, let the hot liquid slide into him and warm him.
“I am interested in these different connections,” he had told her. “The connections between people and the places they call their own. I am interested in how these connections are forged and broken. And how, for some, the connection refuses to break.”
Miss Harker considered this comment for a moment. “When I learned we were leaving Vancouver,” she said finally, “I grieved like a sister had passed on. Of course, I was very young.”
“Oc
tober 5, 1947,” she began. Her family’s last day in the city. Her father was an Anglican minister, and had received notice of a move. There was no question whether or not he would go. Never mind her friends, her school. Never mind that she had a sweetheart.
“Never mind my connections to that place,” she said.
On her last day in the city, Miss Harker walked down from the rectory on Jervis Street to Stanley Park, her favourite place in all of the city, a place that was pure and unimpeachably good. “More like a church than a real church,” she said to the Professor.
She walked and walked, crying often. She crossed the entire park, through the forest to the Burrard Inlet, where she spent some time pulling flowers from the grassy bank and throwing them into the sea. Eventually, she began to hike back through the forest to the city. It was late morning as she climbed up and away from the grey inner harbour, climbing up into the rich greenness of the forest, breathing deeply, feeling a little restored. She stopped to catch her breath at a corner in the trail. The moss-covered trees arched overhead, enfolding her. The forest was hushed. The soft red earth of the trail made no sound under her feet as she looked all around her, resolving that she would remember everything about this instant of stillness.
That was when the children burst into view, startling her as they rounded the corner and tumbled past. A little boy and a little girl, she said. They were wearing red plaid hunter jackets and leather aviator caps, goggles riding high on their foreheads. They were excited, happily screaming back and forth between them in a language she didn’t understand. A language of their own? she wondered at the time.
Miss Harker stared after them, then turned to see the woman who followed. Her eyes tired, face unsmiling. She scuffed along the path in bright red loafers, holding a short fur coat tightly around herself. And as the woman brushed past, Miss Harker could see that she carried a small hatchet. She could have touched it. It had a small chip in the blade.
Miss Harker set down her teacup. “After they were gone, I became frightened,” she said.
“Why was that?” he had asked her.
She didn’t know. Her hand rested on a doily that covered the arm of her chair. Her fingers touched the embroidered cloth and leapt back into her palm, again and again, as if the material were burning hot. Her hand began to tremble, just slightly.
There had been something, someone. She couldn’t be sure. She felt embarrassed at it now, mortified then. Of course, she hadn’t told anyone.
“Someone else?” the Professor tried. “Someone else there?”
No. Yes. Maybe. She had been suddenly spinning in a cool mist of new feelings. An apprehension of her impending departure that was so real, so close, it was as if she had been separated from herself. As if the passing children had carried off the part of her that had known this place, known Stanley Park. Carried her up the trail with them, around the bend, out of sight. Their voices absorbed by the forest, to be, all of them, absorbed.
She fainted. Or she must have. She woke up lying on her back in the soft red earth, the forest rising above her. It seemed to her that the air had grown dark. And all at once there had been faces. Or the sense of faces in the woods. Faces and forms. The sudden, immense sound of a thousand people hovering in the air nearby. Thousands of human sounds singing to her out of the blue light, sounds that came in off the paths and through the leaves and blended into the air around her.
There had been a young man, after that. Skinny and rather ragged. He could only have been about her age.
The Professor set down his own teacup and sat forward in his chair, leaning in, eyes sharp.
“He looked down at me as I lay on the trail. He touched my forehead. I know so because there was a dirty smudge there later. I struggled to sit and he vanished into the woods.”
She walked quickly to the zoo after that, she told him. She stood at the monkey cages and smoked a cigarette. “I was occasionally naughty.”
Late in the afternoon, having smoked through her fear and forgotten her anger, cried herself dry of tears, she returned to the city through the rose gardens. The grass was green but the bushes had been clipped back, sharp stalks coming up from black soil. Overhead, the sky was wool. She wound her way through the empty beds and borders, down towards the road. She turned to look a final time.
The woman stood at the top of the rise, fifty yards away. She looked dishevelled now, even at a distance. Her fur coat was gone. Miss Harker remembered watching her cut across the flower beds at a slow, limping run, eyes on the horizon, seeing nothing. One bare foot sunk into the soil, again and again. It was pasted with black earth. The woman was alone.
The Professor didn’t move for several seconds after the story came to an end.
“I was just a girl,” Miss Harker said. “Resentful, melodramatic about my own affairs.” She felt uprooted and alone. And that night she thought about what she had seen and put it all down to the sad wreckage her sixteen-year-old world had become.
The Professor was frozen at the memory of it, his salal-berry tea long cold. He remembered holding his breath as she described these moments, and he was holding his breath again now.
He exhaled, then took a deep breath of fresh sea air.
“We got a ton of stuff,” Jules said when she heard Jeremy arrive. “Gorgeous chanterelles.” She did not look at her watch.
Then she turned around.
“What the hell happened to you?”
He pointed at his nose. He made a gesture.
“Cut,” he said. “Branch.” And then he began looking around himself as if trying to remember where things were.
Jules turned back to her prep. “How’d the favour go?”
“The Professor,” Jeremy answered. He didn’t want to get into it.
Jules stopped cleaning mushrooms and stroked her hair back behind her ear. “Who just phoned, by the way,” she said. “He wondered if you could see him Sunday.”
Jeremy was walking away from her as she spoke, towards the walk-in. But he stopped abruptly, turned to the prep counter, put his fingertips on it for balance.
He heard what she had said, but wasn’t looking at her. He made a move towards the dish pit and stopped again, staring into the empty drying racks, stranded in the middle of the tiles with a hand on his chin.
Jules glanced over. Curious. Not saying anything.
“So, what’s on tonight?” he asked finally.
Jules put her knife down. “Take a sniff, Chef,” she said. The kitchen was fragrant with simmering wine, bay, thyme and allspice.
He breathed in as instructed. “Lamb shanks.”
Also: salmon with dill beurre blanc, pork chops in Calvados and cream. Both with a choice of new potatoes or roasted garlic polenta. One pasta, farfalle con funghi.
“Four mains?” he said.
“I had to do something with it all,” Jules answered. And as she ran over the appetizers, she watched him look around himself, failing to find his place. There was copious eggplant, which she was working into eggplant caviar for stuffing into tiny tomatoes, she explained.
His eyes were drifting oddly. She tried to follow his gaze, but if he was looking for something, there was no pattern to the search. His eyes went to the walk-in, across the tiles beneath his feet. To the door into the dining room, to the range top. But when he found the knife rack his gaze settled briefly, and then his eyes went round, his mouth opened slightly. His breathing quickened.
“Oh God,” he said as a memory bloomed within him. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” It had been insane to bring the knife. Something he could not afford to lose, staggering around drunk in the wet salal, slashing and cursing.
Something that could be taken from him while he slept.
“Jeremy?” Jules said, coming towards him. He was staring over her shoulder still, one hand gripping the prep counter. She looked again to the knife rack. There were the Wurstof Trident filleting knives, carving and paring knives, and other blades they had each picked up over the years. All i
n the places where they were used to seeing them, and being so, highlighting the empty space at the centre of the rack.
“Where.,” Jules started, knowing immediately. She turned back to him, put a hand on his forearm. “Jeremy? Where is your knife?”
“I can’t …,” he started. “I have done … so stupid. Last night. Oh Jesus.”
“Jeremy,” she said sharply, trying to get him to make eye contact. “You went to the park?”
His hands were at his face now, balled fists in his eyes.
“What the hell did you do?”
“Oh Jesus.”
“Talk to me.”
“I didn’t mean to, even. I literally didn’t see it in my hand until I was there. In the forest stumbling around.”
“Stop it!” she shouted. “What happened?” She reached up and removed his hands from in front of his eyes. Put her own hands on either side of his face.
“I slept there,” he said. “Someone stole my fucking knife!”
Jules let her shoulders round slightly in relief. “Stolen? All right, we’ll go look for it,” she said, knowing that it would be long gone. He got teary. He was embarrassed, but he could not stop it. She hugged him.
“My father—I was there looking for him.”
“I know, I know,” Jules said.
“I’m such an idiot,” he said, and he buried his face in her shoulder.
“You are sometimes,” Jules said. She put his apron around him, tied it up and steered him by the shoulders over to the prep counter with the half-made melizzano. She showed him where the tomatoes were. She put a Henckels nine-inch chef’s knife in his hand and a steel in the other. She fetched a paring knife and laid it on the cutting board next to him.
“Note the time, Chef,” she said, still kindly, but also feeling a tickle of impatience. Knowing he would be useless, she undertook the placement of the lost ads herself. While Jeremy stood at the counter, cursing his own stupidity, she stared down at a job that had to be done.
“Lost near Lost Lagoon early Friday morning,” she said to The Province classified ads desk. “Unique chef’s knife. Sabatier. Devil’s stamp. Engraved on the back of the blade. High sentimental value. One thousand dollar reward. Phone …”
Stanley Park Page 12
