Anarchy

by James Treadwell

  They looked at each other. No one had seen anything.

  “You’re sure this happened in the last half hour?”

  “Absolutely sure.”

  A man walking with a cane had come out of one of the ramshackle houses nearby. “Hey, are you the police?”

  “Officer Maculloch, sir. From Hardy.”

  “You gonna fix the TV?”

  “Why don’t you keep quiet?” one of the women asked.

  “TV isn’t working.”

  Goose concentrated on Mrs. Sampson. “No one saw anything at all? It might not have been kids. Anyone on the street? A car?”

  “Keeps showing junk.”

  “Will you be quiet?”

  Goose stepped away to give herself some room and found herself looking out across the bay. It was the same kind of day it had been ever since she’d arrived, as wet as the weather could be without rain, the clouds like a misty lid resting on top of the world, everything you looked at—sea, sky, trees, or the abrupt sawtooth silhouette of the mainland peaks far across the water—a variation on the underlying green-grey. Like every other stretch of the fifteen-hundred-kilometer waterway that ran tight under the mountainous shadow of the continent’s northwest coast, the bay was studded with islands, overlapping each other in perspective so that water, rock, and damp conifer forest blended together in the middle distance as if they were all the same substance. In the summer, so they told her, there’d be cruise ships going up and down the Inside Passage every day, and cruising yachts stopping off in all the bays, but all Goose had ever seen offshore was the endless indistinct jumbled wilderness.

  Until now. A single yellow kayak was splashing toward the islands, its small dark-haired pilot little more than a smudge even though it couldn’t have been more than a couple hundred meters out.

  Her stomach knotted.

  “I need a boat.”

  “Huh?”

  “A boat. I need a boat. Who can lend me a boat?”

  “Officer Maculloch.” Mrs. Sampson wasn’t the kind of person who forgot names. “This is a crime.”

  “Where’s the crime?” asked the man with the cane, momentarily distracted from his malfunctioning TV.

  “Right here in front of your nose, you old fool.”

  “This is urgent. Police matter.” Goose shouldered away from the small women’s offended dignity toward the beach. She couldn’t be sure what she was seeing, and yet she was sure, somehow; who else would be paddling steadily away into the misty emptiness? She scanned the town for a vessel. In Hardy and Alice there always seemed to be trailers pulled up by the landings, people’s fishing boats or kayaks waiting for the weather to turn. She looked up and down the long sweep of the bay and saw only gulls and eagles and crows stalking the pebbles.

  The little crowd caught up with her, squawking like the gulls. “Officer—”

  “I need to question the girl in that kayak.” She heard herself talking like a policeman, always a bad sign; it meant she wasn’t concentrating. She was chasing ideas one after another. Race back to Hardy and take the RCMP launch? Too slow; she might lose the kid in the mess of islands. Call another officer out in the launch? Janice said they were all busy, and no one was supposed to know Jennifer was on the loose. Get Jonas to come over and take his own boat? Too slow again. What she really needed was—

  “Excuse me.” She had to shout to quiet them. “Listen. Someone in town must have their own kayak. Who’s got a kayak here?”

  “You’re going boating?” One of the small round women looked at Goose from behind bottle-thick glasses, quietly incredulous.

  “George got one,” said the old guy with the cane. “Got it for his boys.”

  “That’s a girl?”

  “She got no life vest. Is that illegal?”

  “How d’you know it’s a girl?”

  “Sir?” Goose spoke sharply again to catch the man’s wandering attention. “Sir? You say you know where there’s a kayak?” It was all she needed. She was fast and very fit; as long as she didn’t lose sight of Jennifer for long, she knew she’d be able to catch up.

  The man waved his stick down the road. “George Hall. With the blue fence.”

  “Officer Maculloch, I’d like an explanation why you’re not giving your attention to—”

  She’d run out of earshot before the sentence was complete. The blue fence was a few metal bars like tent posts with plastic netting strung between, penning in a very fat dog with invisibly stumpy legs. The dog jiggled upright as she sprinted closer, though it turned out not to be her who’d roused it; the door of the house opened and a grizzled man in a lumberjack shirt came out. He stared at Goose in complete confusion.

  “George Hall?” She was breathing hard already.

  “Are you the police?”

  “Mr. Hall, this is an emergency situation. I need to borrow your kayak.” He appeared not to understand. “Quickly, sir.”

  “I didn’t call the police yet.” The dog waddled over to him and flopped down right in front of his feet, as if to suggest that he was better off not going outside.

  “No, sir. It’s not to do with you. I just need to commandeer your boat.” Jeez, Goose, she thought to herself: commandeer?

  “Sure as dammit is to do with me. Someone just stole my kids’ kayak.”

  • • •

  Once she was safely back in the car and racing away as fast as she dared from the questions and complaints, she got Cope on the radio.

  “She showed up this morning, sir. In Rupert. She vandalized the Band property and then took off in a kayak.”

  “She what?”

  “She stole a kayak. Took off in it. Out into the strait.”

  “And you didn’t stop her?”

  “I was called too late. I need a vessel, sir. I’ll be taking the launch.”

  “The damn launch is in McNeill. What are you talking about?”

  “She’s in a kayak, sir, by herself. She won’t be hard to track down. It’s a bright yellow kayak.”

  “What did you say about the Band?”

  She explained, but she was already snatching at the next idea. It would mean getting hold of Jonas, quickly.

  “That’s just perfect. Just what I needed.” She could hear Cope sagging. “Did you talk to Margaret Sampson?”

  “Yes, sir. I—”

  “Damn it. I don’t suppose there’s any hope you asked her to keep it quiet till we find her?”

  “Keep what quiet?” A patrol car sped past in the other direction at the airport turn, lights flashing.

  “‘Keep what quiet?’ What do you think? Didn’t we talk about this?”

  “Oh. No, sir, no one saw Jennifer. Identified her, I mean.”

  “Then who— You’d better start from the beginning, Maculloch.”

  No, she’d better not. She’d explain later. “Emergency, sir,” she mumbled, and cut him off.

  In the few seconds of relative silence while she pulled out her own phone, she seemed to hear a larger stillness, the emptiness of water, the solitary tlatch tlatch of paddle blades.

  “Jonas?”

  “Goose! What’s up? Mountie got her man?”

  “Okay, listen. I need your help. I’m in a hurry.”

  “You’re always in a—”

  “This is serious. The kid’s out in the strait. I need your boat. Fast. You hear me, Jonas? Really fast. Like sirens and actual running, that kind of fast.”

  “You’re kidding, man. I’m on duty here.”

  “I’ve got maybe an hour to save my ass. This is what you’re going to do, Jonas. Are you listening? You run outside, get in the car, floor it over to Hardy, meet me at the pier. You’re going to do that for me, right away. Okay? Right as soon as I hang up.”

  “It is kind of a nice ass.”

  She hung up.


  • • •

  Time ached as she waited by the half-abandoned waterfront condos. She recognized the feeling from the last three minutes of games her team was losing, when the other girls had the ball and whatever you did, however hard you hit, you knew you weren’t going to get it back. She listened distractedly to the unusually heavy chatter on the radio. Janice called her.

  “Hi there, Marie.” Her schoolmistressy voice. “I’ve just had a phone call from Mrs. Sampson. I guess she’s a little unhappy.”

  “There’s an emergency. Something’s come up.”

  “Oh, okay. We have procedures for an emergency. I’ll get some backup to you right away.”

  “It’s not like that. It’s, ah.” She could feel the whole situation getting worse around her, underneath her; she was sinking into something embarrassing and stupid without quite knowing how she’d got there. “It’s personal.”

  “Oh. Oh, I’m sorry. Is there anything—”

  “I’ll get to Rupert later. Tell them we have a suspect, okay? I need to go.”

  Which was true. She needed to go. There was still time before the ferry was due to leave; it hadn’t even come in yet. She knew it sat at the dock in Hardy Bay for two or three hours while they turned it around. She had a misty recollection of the map. There were three or four small islands in Rupert Bay, and beyond them just the open water of the Queen Charlotte Strait. Nowhere a yellow plastic kayak could hide for long, whichever direction it went. They’d just have to round the headland between Hardy and Rupert and cruise along the coast and they’d see the boat before long. The shore was all forest and rock as far as she knew. No roads, no hiding places, nowhere to go.

  Nowhere to go. (Tlatch, tlatch, tlatch, tlatch. What was she doing out there? Where was she going? What if it hadn’t even been her?)

  Jonas tried to call once too, but she decided he’d probably come faster if she didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure what to tell him anyway. She still hadn’t settled on an explanation by the time she saw the patrol car cruise, unhurriedly, down from the roundabout and pull up in the disintegrating oversized nine-tenths-deserted parking lot that served the dock. Mercifully, Jonas was that rare kind of person who could do things without perpetually asking why (no drive, Goose had thought to herself on their first day together; no curiosity; I hope I don’t end up like that myself after a year in a place where nothing much ever happens. But after a week she admitted to herself that she wanted to be more like him, not that her parents’ genes would ever allow it.) He took her down through the stained and damp and generally unloved remnants of the Hardy fishing and leisure fleet to his own cluttered whaler, if not exactly at a jog then at least without pausing to ask what she thought she was doing. The closest he came to a reproach was just before he started the motor.

  “Not the greatest time, you know, man. Had a couple of guys in the station already asking about the bank.”

  One visitor to the station in a whole day would have counted as a crime wave in Alice, let alone two in a morning. “I’ll make it up to you. I can take the next few shifts.”

  He backed them through the puff of oily smoke coughed up by the outboard. She felt cold already, only a few feet from land. “So, where to, Jeeves? No, wait. Jeeves is the chauffeur. Other guy.”

  She explained what she’d seen. For some reason it was easier to say on water, as if the unlikelihood didn’t matter so much here. She had to shout; Jonas gunned the throttle as soon as he was clear of the dock. He obviously didn’t mind going fast as long as he could stand still while it was happening.

  “Keep going like this,” she yelled, “and I reckon it won’t take too long. No one will notice you left.”

  He leaned across to reply. “I dunno.”

  “You think she can outrun us in a kayak?”

  “Nah. Look at that.” He nodded forward.

  “What?”

  “Looks like a fog.”

  She was so used to the universal, evergreen-tinged grey of the horizon that she’d stopped noticing when it changed shape. The coastal mountains were gone, replaced by nothing. Out beyond the bay the sea and the sky mingled into a single looming presence that seemed to be equally solid and air.

  “Crap.”

  They powered on close to the eastern side of the bay, passing the ferry terminal and the last few holiday cabins overlooking it. (Strange place for them, Goose thought, though if her holiday choices were fishing or watching a ferry go in and out, she’d have chosen the latter.) The air was wet and chill enough to sting like sleet if she stuck her hand out of the shelter of the windshield.

  “How long have we got?” she asked.

  He swayed comfortably while the boat bounced under his feet and the wheel shook in his hand. “Couldn’t tell you. Us native guys got excused meteorology class at the Depot.”

  “Jeez, Jonas.”

  He shook his head. “One thing for sure, if that rolls in here we aren’t finding anyone in it.”

  “So what do we do?”

  He thought about it for a while, then leaned on the throttle. She grabbed the cold metal of the back of her seat. “Go faster, I guess.”

  As soon as they rounded the eastern tip of the bay the strait grew surprisingly rough. From a distance it looked as even and tranquil as the utterly sheltered inlet beside which Alice sat, water so smooth that when Goose had first taken her own kayak out there she’d felt like a calligrapher marking patient lines and dots on a vast silver sheet. But here, even in the absence of anything but the faintest wind, the sea felt the presence of the ocean a hundred kilometers west. It was restless. It made itself into fist-thick ridges and troughs that smacked the skimming hull of Jonas’s whaler as if they wouldn’t have minded punching it back where it came from. Looking over her shoulder now Goose could see straight up the Inside Passage, out past the flat head of Vancouver Island toward the ocean and the north. There was no passage. The fog plugged it like mortar.

  “Gonna be tight getting back.”

  Goose gritted her teeth in silent frustration.

  “Might not even be the kid,” Jonas said. “You didn’t get a look at her, right?”

  She didn’t say anything. She knew with complete certainty that it was Jennifer she’d seen paddling away, just out of reach, just out of her grip. If she hadn’t been sure before she was now. She was the fog girl, the disappearing girl, the one you could never catch up with or ever see.

  What if Jennifer had made the fog happen?

  (This kind of thought came more easily on water.)

  What if she’d made the fog happen the way she’d made the cell door open?

  “ ’Nother few minutes east and we can turn into Rupert Bay. Pretty shallow in places there, though.”

  “It’s okay. You can turn back.”

  “I don’t mind giving it a try. Know my way around out here pretty good.”

  “Nah. We won’t find her.”

  Jonas looked at her, surprised.

  “We won’t.” Goose set her jaw. “Let’s go back.”

  “Hey,” he said. “You okay? This doesn’t sound like you.” He eased the throttle back. The ambient sounds became a presence, the sea’s insidious whisper.

  “How much were you involved in the investigation?”

  “When Carl died?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Depends what you mean. Not much, I guess. But then you couldn’t really avoid it. Contagious.”

  “You ever read the whole file?”

  “Oh, man. Maybe once I’m done with War and Peace.”

  “If you read the file you’d know we’re not going to find her.”

  “Why’s that?”

  She looked away. “You’d just know.”

  A long muted groan spread from the sea behind them.

  “Foghorn at Scarlett Point,” Jonas said, and spun the whee
l. “Must be coming down faster ’n I thought.”

  To Goose it had sounded like a moan of defeat. She slumped in the seat, imagining Jennifer paddling still, safely out of sight, secretly, purposefully. Going somewhere even though she had nowhere to go. Now that Jonas had turned back, the fog was dead ahead. Goose hadn’t seen proper sunshine since she’d moved up here. The sun might as well be a myth. This wasn’t the sun’s country. Nothing was sharp, clear, bright. She’d rented a mountain bike on her first afternoon off and taken one of the forest trails, remembering happy autumn weekends in the hills outside Montreal. After an hour she’d returned the bike and gone home. The forest here was endlessly repetitive: straight, wet, evergreen, oppressively quiet, a thick deep wall that looked as if it went on forever, like Jennifer’s silence, like the impending fog.

  It caught them just as they turned back into Hardy Bay. One minute they could see the ferry dock and the town ahead, looking pathetically diminished, blips in the landscape; the next minute they could see nothing. Jonas throttled all the way back and peered at the compass mounted on the whaler’s dash.

  “Due southwest should do it. Just have to take it slow. You want to go up front and keep an eye out?”

  Goose did a full turn. The world had vanished. It was like there was no left or right, no up or down even. With nothing to reflect, the water itself appeared to have turned into cloud.

  “For what?”

  “Anything. Deadheads.” She’d been warned about deadheads the first time she put her kayak in. They were floating logs broken loose from the giant booms that passed up and down the Inside Passage every day, whole stripped tree trunks heavy as a bus and often drifting upright with only a foot of their length showing above the surface, waiting to punch a hole in your hull. “Hardy. Won’t see it till we’re on top of it.” He pulled a portable horn out of a locker and aimed a single long blast into the fog. Far away, the lighthouse moaned again like an echo.

  “What’s that other noise?” Goose asked, after she’d been staring uselessly at nothing for a few minutes.

  “Huh?”

  Her senses felt disconnected. The mumble of the motor in the stern sounded like it was coming from the sky. She heard her own breath outside herself. Was the other thing just the sound of water curling gently away from the hull?