Leaving the World

by Douglas Kennedy

  But the Edmonton Journal did carry a quote from the ‘MacIntyre Family Minister’, Larry Coursen, saying that ‘“Ivy was one of God’s little angels ”’. He also noted that, when he first met Brenda MacIntyre, she was in desperate need of healing. ‘“But when she accepted Jesus Christ as her Lord and Savior, the healing process began . . .”’

  Yeah, sure it did . . .

  Within weeks of getting that telephone call from Jesus, Brenda was ‘“clean and sober ”’. She’d found a job in the local Safeway supermarket. She’d begun to ‘“take responsibility for her actions”’ and had completely cleaned up the family home and had ‘“re-established her relationship with her children”’. (What exactly did he mean by that?) But – as the Rev. Larry Coursen was quick to point out – there was an ‘“ongoing sadness in her life”’.

  No doubt this ‘sadness’ was her very unsaved, deadbeat husband George.

  The Herald, meanwhile, had a quote from a local Townsend guy named Stu Pattison. He knew MacIntyre from a local hockey team they both played on, and said that he ‘“doted on Ivy and actually once went crazy in Townsend when some kids in a pickup drove her off the road while she was on a bicycle”’.

  I scribbled in my notebook the name Larry Coursen and that of Stu Pattison. I also noted the detail about MacIntyre driving long-haul trucks and placed a comment: ‘Did she ever file a domestic abuse charge?’ next to an entry I made labeled: ‘Brenda MacIntyre’. Then I asked the woman behind the café counter for a pair of scissors and clipped all the articles I had just read. I folded them inside my notebook, walked up to Reid’s stationers and bought some plain white paper, several files and a bottle of white glue. Down a little alleyway from Reid’s was an internet café. I spent the next three hours there. Using assorted search engines I found out everything I could about George and Brenda MacIntyre and their two children, printing copious amounts of information along the way.

  From the Regina Leader-Post in 2002 I learned that, in February of that year, MacIntyre had been arrested after manhandling a woman in a truck-stop bar. The woman didn’t press charges – but it seems he also directly solicited sex from her and ‘exposed himself to her’ while they were on the way back to his truck.

  I read this paragraph again, trying to understand the narrative logic behind it. MacIntyre pulls into Regina and picks up some woman in a bar, then invites her back to his truck. He evidently didn’t have to coerce her back – which meant that the manhandling charge just couldn’t wash. She went willingly – but then, halfway there, he exposes himself to her? What the hell was that all about? If she had agreed to return to his vehicle for sex, why would he pull a stunt like that?

  There was more. In an article in the local Townsend rag in May 2005, MacIntyre was found guilty of ‘damaging private property after his daughter was forced off the road on her bicycle by a couple of adolescents in a car. Ivy wasn’t injured in this incident [the reporter pointed out] but was nonetheless badly shaken up.’ This being a small town, she knew the two brothers who’d done it. When MacIntyre found out their names, he went over to their house in the middle of the night and, using a tire iron, proceeded to smash their pick-up. Their father ran out in the middle of this demolition job and MacIntyre threatened to flatten his head. The cops were called. MacIntyre spent the night in jail and ended up having to pay $3,000 in restitution.

  In the same article, his then-employer, Dwane Poole, was quoted as saying that ‘“George MacIntyre was about the most talented guy with a lathe and a piece of wood that I’d ever come across”’, but that he could turn ugly when crossed.

  I read on, finding every published word I could about the case, printing over fifty pages of material, filling my notebook with names and places and dates and phrases that I was certain were pertinent to the case. By the time I got home it was late afternoon. I did something I had never done before: I plugged the television antenna cable into the wall socket and actually watched the news. The Ivy MacIntyre disappearance was the first item. A CBC reporter was standing outside the ‘“Criminal Investigation Unit of the RCMp in Calgary where George MacIntyre is still being questioned . . .”’ but he had little else to say about the progress of the investigation.

  But when I woke from a profoundly deep sleep at seven the next morning, there was a bombshell lead item on the CBC Radio news.

  ‘“A formal arraignment of Ivy’s father George on charges of her abduction is scheduled to be brought today.”’

  Did this mean that the bloody undergarment had been found? And if so, did it prove conclusively that the blood was Ivy MacIntyre’s? And did the technicians also find DNA traces of her father on the same garment? And was his born-again wife really the saint she was being portrayed as? And was I the only damn person in the Province of Alberta who saw the look on George MacIntyre’s face as he was being led off to jail and knew: the guy didn’t do it?

  Questions, questions . . . and why wasn’t anybody posing them?

  So, as soon as the news item was finished I made a decision: I was going to call in sick for the next two days . . . during which time I was going to crack this case. Crack it wide open.

  As I decided this, another thought came to me: You are seriously unhinged.

  Nine

  MRS WOODS WAS far too understanding about my ongoing ‘gastric flu’.

  ‘I gather it’s a horrible dose,’ she said, ‘and you really must look after yourself.’

  ‘I feel bad about not being there,’ I lied.

  ‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘Illness is illness. Anyway, this is the first time all year you’ve ever been sick and you’re always putting in extra hours and working weekends. Take the rest of the week off – and do get better.’

  I actually felt fine. Maybe it was the restorative night’s sleep that always follows a hangover. Or maybe it was a strange sense of direction. Ever since I had made the proper acquaintance of the Ivy MacIntyre case, some switch had clicked in my brain. It wasn’t the switch that suddenly erased all memory, all pain. No, this was a mechanism which simply pushed me deeper and deeper into the bizarre narration that was this case. It was like losing yourself in a movie, yet one in which I had no idea whatsoever what the ending would be . . . if, that is, there was even to be an ending.

  Still . . . to work.

  I called Avis and arranged to pick up in a couple of hours. Then I used my cellphone and called Information for Townsend, Alberta. I was in luck. All the numbers I sought were listed – with the exception of that for George and Brenda MacIntyre, which (according to the operator) had recently been changed to unlisted. I then began to make a series of calls, starting with Dwane Poole. He was a soft-spoken man with what I sensed was a natural graciousness. I explained that I was Nancy Lloyd (a name I simply made up), a reporter with the Vancouver Sun, and that I was coming to Townsend that afternoon and was wondering if I could have a half-hour of his time.

  ‘I kind of feel talked out about all this,’ he said.

  ‘I can appreciate that,’ I said, ‘but I have serious doubts about the “rush to judgment” element in this case. I think George MacIntyre is being hanged, drawn and quartered before all the evidence is in.’

  ‘I thought that too,’ he said, ‘until that piece of clothing was found in his shop. Now everyone’s saying that the DNA and blood match up . . .’

  ‘Would two-thirty p.m. be OK?’

  ‘I guess so,’ he said, sounding reluctant but not wanting to come across as impolite.

  I then called the Rev. Larry Coursen and got his answering machine. So I left a message, telling him that Nancy Lloyd from the Vancouver Sun called, and might he be around today or tomorrow for an interview? Of course I knew I was taking a risk by giving him the name of the paper. If he was conscientious about such things, he could easily call them and discover he was dealing with a fraud. But I was banking on the fact that he had been so besieged by requests from the media that he would simply accept this one on face value . . . especially as I had a
lso gone to the precaution of making certain that Coursen had yet to be interviewed by anyone from the Sun.

  I rang the school where Ivy MacIntyre was a student and asked to speak to the principal. When I explained who I was, I was put on to a deputy named Mrs Missy Schulder. She told me that the school had made a decision not to engage in any interviews with the press.

  ‘We have nothing to say about this,’ she told me.

  ‘Did you yourself know Ivy?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course I know Ivy,’ she said. ‘I was her home-room teacher for two years. Nice girl. Liked the dad too – even if he did have his angry side.’

  ‘But did he ever turn that anger against his daughter?’

  ‘What you trying to get me to say here?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing, ma’am . . . and this is totally off the record.’

  ‘That’s what they all say.’

  ‘Well, totally off the record between us: I don’t think he did it.’

  ‘And what makes you say that, Ms . . . ?’

  ‘Lloyd. Nancy Lloyd. And the reason I’m saying that is because I know damn well a guilty man wouldn’t keep a bloodstained article of clothing around his workshop.’

  ‘I’m with you there,’ she said in a low excited hush. ‘Let me tell you something else, Ms Lloyd. I never liked the wife. And ever since she got religion . . . well, “insufferable” is about the mildest word I can use to describe her. George may have been from a low-rent background, and he may have had a lot of “anger issues”, and also never got on with his boy, Michael . . . who I always thought was a bit of a punk anyway . . .’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘He was always hanging with biker types, got into a lot of drugs, gave his dad a lot of lip. George, from what I heard, got real furious with Michael when he discovered he was dealing crystal meth, and Brenda, the wife, defended her “poor little victimized boy” and sent him off to her people. And Michael did get himself straightened out and is driving trucks cross-country. But if I was a journalist nosing around this case, I’d look long and hard at the wife. She was always trailer trash.

  ‘You know, her mother had done time as a prostitute in Winnipeg – what a place to be a working girl. And she had this father who’d beaten her older brother so senseless after an argument that the kid was in a coma for a week and was never completely right again after that. Her dad did seven years in prison for that little incident.

  ‘But the big rumor about Brenda, and one that came out of Red Deer – the town where she grew up – is that, at thirteen, she’d fallen pregnant after being raped by her father. The pregnancy was terminated. No charges were ever brought against him. And three years after this, she met George MacIntyre. He was twenty-four – and was driving trucks at this time. He’d made the mistake of eyeing Brenda up in a café in Red Deer frequented by long-distance drivers. They ended up “doing it” in the back of his pick-up. And, wouldn’t you know it, she fell pregnant.’

  So George MacIntyre, from a young age, had a habit of picking up women whenever he stopped while driving, and using the sleeping area behind his cab as the romantic spot in which to bed them.

  Now why did he do the right thing by Brenda and marry her – and how did she track him down after she discovered herself with child? According to Missy Schulder, the couple lived in Red Deer for six years, during which time Ivy was also born. Then MacIntyre lost his job, due to excessive drinking. So the family moved to Townsend where he was offered the chance to apprentice as a carpenter to an old family friend named Dwane Poole. And then things started going really wrong.

  I scribbled all this down as she spewed it forth – and felt that giddy high a real journalist must feel when they bump into the motherload of sources.

  ‘Can you elaborate a little more on that?’ I asked.

  ‘I actually think I’ve said enough.’

  ‘One final thing: the other two local girls who went missing . . .’

  ‘You mean, Hildy Krebs and Mimi Pullinger?’

  I wrote those names down.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, trying to sound knowledgeable. ‘Hildy and Mimi.’

  ‘Well, Hildy disappeared in 2002 and Mimi in 2005. They were both a little older than Ivy when they vanished. Fifteen, sixteen years old. The thing was, they were both the sort of girls who were always landing themselves in deep doo-doo. Hildy got herself up the spout at fourteen and then lost the baby early due to a drug overdose. And Mimi was thrown out of school twice for sniffing glue in the ladies, then ran off for a bit with a biker . . .’

  ‘Sounds like a quiet little town you have there.’

  ‘Now don’t go writing anything like that in your paper. Townsend is, by and large, a pretty OK place. Everywhere’s got white trash. We just have white trash that does dumb stuff which lands us all in the papers and has snoopy reporters like you digging for dirt . . . no offense meant, of course.’

  I decided Missy Schulder was pretty damn good news – and someone who probably relished her role as the town cynic.

  ‘Any chance you might want to meet up with me for a coffee when I’m down in Townsend?’

  ‘Hell, no,’ she said. ‘I mean, I’ve got to live here, right? And if I’m seen with some Nosey Parker, well, I’ll never hear the end of it, now, will I? But two tips. Since you’re from Vancouver, you might want to ask around the flop houses off East Hastings. Rumor has it that both Hildy and Mimi have gone to ground there. Junkies. And my second ten-cent bit of wisdom of the morning is to repeat what I said to you earlier: follow the wife. She’s the evil one in the story . . . but if you quote me on that . . .’

  ‘Fear not, it won’t happen,’ I told her.

  After the call I went to the local cybercafé and looked up all could find about Hildy Krebs and Mimi Pullinger. Everything Missy Schulder told me was on the money – all the trouble into which they landed themselves, the idiot boyfriends, the two disappearances three years apart which were not connected at the time, but which had now come back into focus courtesy of Ivy MacIntyre.

  I printed all the material on the two missing girls and wondered if their parents might be amenable to a visit by a fraudulent Vancouver Sun journalist. Then I Googled everything I could find on Michael MacIntyre. Nothing of interest. But even if he was legally allowed to come out and say that, as much as he hated his father, George couldn’t harm his daughter . . . well, would that change anything? Of course not. In a case like this, everyone was so wrapped up in the need for closure – for finding the bogeyman and seeing him punished – that they were willing to construct a narrative which served their purposes. And this narrative essentially revolved around the idea that George MacIntyre was the killer amongst them.

  On the way south to Townsend, the local Calgary CBC station talked about the investigation which was continuing both in Calgary – where Mr MacIntyre was still being held – and in Townsend. No doubt a team of RCMP forensic specialists were now inspecting every fiber in every corner of George’s workshop.

  Yes, go ahead and micro-examine every damn corner of it. And while you’re at it, why not follow the advice of Missy Schulder – someone who actually knows the human territory here – and cherchez la femme.

  That is certainly what I was planning to do if Brenda MacIntyre would see me.

  The road south edged its way through Calgary’s endless urban sprawl. Then, suddenly, it all fell away and I was in open country. Though part of me wanted to look up and see what exactly I was passing through, I knew that this could be, at the very least, unsettling . . . especially after the business with Vern the other day. But it’s amazing how you can limit your peripheral vision when necessary and simply focus your eyes on the roll of the tarmacadam in front of you.

  I did finally look up when I got to Townsend. It was a blink-twice-you-miss-it sort of place: a gasoline alley with the requisite monocultural crap (Tim Horton’s, an outpost of the Red Lobster, a Burger King), augmented by a short Main Street of undistinguished concrete buildings an
d one or two red-brick hold-overs from the 1950s. There was a bank. There was a supermarket. There was a shop that sold outdoor stuff. There was an old-style Mom and Pop restaurant. There was a sad-looking used bookstore, largely specializing in blockbuster paperbacks (but still, it was a bookstore). There was a bar. I thought about doing that old reporter thing of going into the local saloon and trying to strike up a conversation with the proprietor, in the hopes of eliciting some insights or useful information. But small towns have their own internal bush telegraphs and I didn’t want word to get out too fast about me being here. Best to not announce myself to the world.

  Dwane Poole lived on a side street not far from the ugly breezeblock high school which Ivy attended. His was a simple ranch house on a half-acre lot, with an extended detached garage taking up most of the available garden space. I heard the whirr of a rotary saw from the garage, so I approached its door. It was open. Poole was inside, wearing clear goggles as he fed a large piece of finished timber into the circular saw. He pushed the wood through, cutting it cleanly, then looked up and saw me.

  ‘You Nancy?’ he asked, whipping off his goggles. He was a thin, diminutive man in his late fifties, wearing a wool check shirt, baggy jeans and round wire-rimmed glasses. I could easily imagine him, thirty years earlier, passing the bong around a crash pad while wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt. Now he came across as quiet, reserved, with a strong streak of shyness. His workshop was a masterpiece of organization: all the tools immaculately arranged, stacks of finished cabinets on one wall (the craftsmanship was impressive), drawings, design plans and a large wooden desk filling another wall. Behind the desk was a picture of Dwane with a young man attired in the uniform of the Canadian Armed Forces.

  ‘Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,’ I said, accepting his outstretched hand.

  ‘You’re about the fifth journalist who’s beaten a path to this door,’ he said.