My Temporary Life

by Martin Crosbie

  “I’m a friend of Heather’s. We came into town together a few days ago. She told me about you. I wanted to meet you.” I tell him the truth, or at least the part of the truth that I’m going to let him in on for now.

  He seems to lighten up. His hands stop shaking and he looks at me in a reassured way. “Heather’s in town? Where’s she been? I always wondered what happened to her. She had a hell of a rough ride after her mother died.” He seems to contemplate that for a moment before continuing. “You tell her I said hello. She was a good little worker.”

  I keep pushing. I need to get a real reaction from him. I need to know where Emily is and why she isn’t in the family pictures. “It’s Emily actually that I want to know about, how Emily is doing. That’s why we’re here, back in town I mean.”

  His response is immediate. “I don’t think I know Emily. Did she work here too? The boys might remember her.”

  He doesn’t know. He’s telling the truth. If he is lying, then he’s a master deceiver. I keep staring at him, and he looks back as though he wants me to explain who Emily is.

  “You really don’t know, Michael? Isn’t Emily your daughter?” I’m out of options. I don’t know what else to say.

  Again, he answers right away. “I don’t have a daughter. I have two sons. You met Tom, outside, remember.” He looks at me as though he thinks the coffee is clouding my mind.

  “You had a daughter though, Michael. You had a daughter ten years ago. Emily, I’m talking about Emily. She went missing a couple of days ago. I know all about her, Michael.” Still, I push, wanting to hear an explanation from him.

  The man shows no signs of panic or fear. He’s sitting, facing me. He faces a man bandaged, and cut, and bruised. I know I look desperate, because I feel desperate, but he still shows no signs that he recognizes Emily’s name. “You’re mistaken. I told you I don’t have any daughters, just sons. Now what exactly is your relationship to Heather, and what is it that you want from me?” He has his businessman voice on now, and I can tell that he’s tired of our conversation.

  I lower my head into my hands, forgetting about the bruises, and wince in pain when I touch it. It doesn’t add up. It didn’t add up from the moment I walked into the yard, and saw his sons working. It hasn’t added up from the time that the drunk gave me a ride home. This man doesn’t have a daughter. I look up and decide to try a different tact. “Heather had a daughter. She had a daughter ten years ago. Her name is Emily. She lives in town here.” I let the words hang in the air, watching him.

  He takes the words in thoughtfully, watching me, and then turns to glance out the window at his sons, working. “Ten years ago, ten years ago, she would have been here.” He stands up suddenly, spilling his coffee on the desk. “I don’t know how. I don’t know how that could have happened.”

  He’s mumbling now, and keeps talking to himself, as though he’s trying to remember something. His face turns an ashen colour, and he paces back and forth in front of the desk. He keeps repeating that it was ‘ten years ago’. He touches his lips the same way I do when my numbers temporarily don’t add up. He looks like a man who can’t quite make sense of the situation. I try again, still trying to believe that I’m talking to the father of Heather’s child. I sit up straight in my chair, and look at him accusingly. “She had your child, didn’t she, Michael? You and Heather were together?”

  Before I can finish, he’s answering me, not shouting but talking firmly, positively, adamantly leaning towards me, trying to make sure I don’t miss a word. “No, no, no. Of course not, she was a child, a little girl. I wouldn’t touch her. They all come here and work for me. Heather had some problems.” He pauses, looking at me, his eyes softening for a moment, as though he can tell me what the problems were without using words.

  “If I’d known...If I’d known that it was that serious. I didn’t know she was with child, that she was pregnant. How could I know? She left. She just left.” He’s almost in tears now. His face is still colourless and his skin is sweating. His eyes are wet as he looks at me pleadingly.

  It still doesn’t make any sense. I still don’t know what happened. He’s in front of me now, wringing his hands together, nervously. He looks like a man with regrets. I need to know what those regrets are. “What do you mean, Michael? What problems? What do you mean, if you’d known?”

  He sits back down on his seat on the other side of the desk and tries to regain his composure. He wipes his eyes with the back of his hands, and leans forward on the desk, before speaking again. “That father of hers, the cop. She told me. She came right in here and told me, not in so many words but...if I’d known how serious it was. If I’d known what was really happening in that house...”

  All of a sudden, I know. Maybe I knew for a while and hid from it, I can’t say for sure, but now I know. Now, I know. My stomach has a lump in it, and I feel sick. The anger takes a moment to come, but I know it will. It’ll come. I stare at him as he put his hands on the desk, looking at them. He just keeps looking at his hands, shaking his head. I want to hit him. I want to hit him the way my dad taught me to hit the boys at school. I want to hit him even though it’s not him that I’m angry at. I reach across the table, and almost do it, but I can’t. I know that he might have been able to stop all of the pain that Heather suffered, and all of the pain that she’s suffering now, but although I want to take my anger out on someone, my fight isn’t with him.

  Minutes seem to pass, as the gravity of it all slowly hits us. When Michael finally looks up, his eyes are red and his face is wet. He wipes himself with his sleeve, and when he speaks his words are clear. It’s as though he’s making a confession, which I suppose in a way he is. “I knew who she was of course. We all did, John Postman’s daughter. And I knew what happened. Her mother died. Her mother never seemed like a happy woman, and she was always sick. It’s a small town. You know these things, especially when it’s the police chief’s wife. Tom and Mark were a few years younger than Heather, so I’d see her parents, see them at the school or in town.”

  He keeps going. It’s almost as though he’s afraid to stop now, and wants to get it all out. “Well, Heather turns out to be a great kid, a good worker, quiet and withdrawn, but a good hard worker. Her dad would pick her up, waiting in his cruiser right over there, never wanting to come into the yard. He’d nod at me, if I saw him.” He shakes his head as though he doesn’t want to remember the memory.

  “She’s here for six, maybe eight months, works through the summer, and then some weekends. She’d sit and eat her lunch right out on those steps that you came up, sometimes all by herself. She was getting more and more withdrawn the longer she was here, wasn’t talking to the other kids. My boys were real young then, eight, ten years old themselves.” He pauses, thinking, I suppose, of his own children.

  “Anyways, I ask her one day; ask her if she’s okay. I take her up here into the office, let her eat her lunch sitting at one of the desks while I work.” He stares out the window again. I can tell that he doesn’t want to look at me. I can see the pain in his face as he contorts his mouth, trying to say the words. “She tells me that things aren’t good at home. She says that she and her dad, they don’t get along. She says, he sometimes, I think she said, took liberties with her. I tried not to understand what she meant. I tried to explain it to myself, tell myself that it was a teenager not getting along with her father.”

  The snow is starting to fall outside, just as the sky has been promising all day. I can see Tom, in the yard, looking up at his dad, holding his hands out at his sides, indicating that the weather is changing. Michael forces a smile back and raises his hand in a wave. He turns and looks, continuing his recollection. “It’s sometimes easy to look the other way. Her Dad was respected here, still is. I looked the other way. And then one day, she’s gone. I heard that she moved away, moved out west, and I never thought about her again.” He stops suddenly, trying to make himself believe. “I wish I could say that I didn’t know what she meant. I
wish I could tell you that, but I’m not sure. I just don’t know for sure.”

  He’s a beaten man. His confession to me hasn’t made his face look any less heavy than it was when he began. He’ll have to carry the knowledge around with him for the rest of his life that he might have been able to do something, he might have been able to help. I suppose that there are some amends that never really can be made. I think about getting up and leaving him right where he sits, and going home, but now that I know, know for sure; in many ways my journey is just beginning. I still don’t know where Heather is, but the reason that we first came to Woodbine, all of a sudden, is more important than ever. I have to find Emily.

  I look over at him as he sinks into his chair. “There’s something that you can do for me, Michael, something that might help you feel better.”

  CHAPTER 27

  The anger doesn’t go away. It doesn’t subside. It simmers. It finds a place deep inside, and stays there, waiting. I’ve been lied to the whole time I’ve been in Woodbine, longer even. I’ve been lied to ever since the camping trip at the lake. And now, the man that I’ve come to confront, to hunt almost, has turned out to be just a decent man who has pictures of his family on his desk. He made a mistake. He turned a blind eye when he should have done something, but it isn’t up to me to be his judge.

  He reverts back to being the businessman that he was when I first came in his office. He knows police officers. Most of them worked for him when they were kids. And when I tell him the story of my police station beating and jailing, he says that he knows Ellison, the young officer who was with me. He trusts him, and thinks that he can get some information from him. The phone call starts out as an almost jovial chat, but soon reverts into a low voiced conversation. I can tell that he’s pressing the man on the other end of the line, almost begging him for information.

  He listens intently for a moment, his eyes darting back and forth. I can tell that his mind is racing. Then, he speaks firmly to Ellison again, telling him that he just needs a little information, a little help.

  He hangs up and looks at me as though he’s proud of himself. “She’s not at the police station. They were en route there, but then got ordered to take her to Thornside. She’s still there, but under guard.”

  He answers my perplexed look before I can even get the question out. “It’s a hospital, a facility for the mentally challenged. Oh, and there’s more, he says it’s very interesting, but there haven’t been any charges laid, none at all. It’s all being handled by a senior officer, her father, presumably, and nobody seems to be saying what’s happening. In fact nobody seems to know what’s happening.”

  My mind races; if she’s in hospital then she’s probably okay. She has to be. And, no charges, that doesn’t add up, but then again maybe it does. Maybe her father thinks that this will all just go away again. “Where’s Thornside? Is it local?” I look at the snow coming down, outside the window.

  “No, it’s about an hour from here. You’re not going to get there tonight. They’re real good at clearing the roads, but I’ll bet that it’ll be tomorrow morning before you can travel on them. There’s the main highway, and then the one that takes you to the hospital. They’ll be treacherous in this snow.”

  My mind is working again. I can still feel the anger. I can still feel the betrayal, and want answers to my questions, but I know that I have to take one step at a time. “Let’s call the hospital. Let’s call Thornside, and see if we can check on her status.” I have an ally now. I’m not sure how much help he’s going to give me, but I’m going to take advantage of it while I can.

  He looks up the phone number and quickly calls them. The conversation is businesslike again. I think of the mental image I had of this man. I’d considered him a monster.

  He hangs up the phone. The discussion was short. “They confirmed that she’s there. She was admitted three days ago. She’s medicated and resting. That’s all I could get out of them. But it sounds like she’s okay.”

  “You did good, Michael. You did really good.” He has done well. He’s gotten me more information than I’d been able to get, stuck in a jail cell, yelling my questions at Macklin.

  I stand up to leave not knowing whether or not I should shake his hand. He speaks first. “I wonder if you’d do me a favour. I wonder if you’d meet my boys, meet them properly.”

  For some reason it’s important to him. It’s as though he needs to show me, show me that he really is a decent man. I nod as we make our way out into the snowy afternoon.

  When we reach the yard, we see that the boys have been clearing the snow. Tom has a shovel, and the other boy has a small plough attached to the front of the forklift, and is methodically clearing the yard. They have playful grins on their faces, as though they know that it’s falling faster than they can clear it. Their father waves them over towards us, as we stand in the shelter of the building. “Guys, this is Malcolm. He’s a friend of Heather Postman’s. You probably remember Heather from when she worked here.”

  The young men each hold their hands out for me to shake, both confidently looking into my eyes. The forklift driver speaks first. “It’s good to meet you. I remember Heather. She’d climb all the way to the top of the feed sacks, and sit up there eating lunch all by herself sometimes.” He smiles at the memory. His face changes as he seems to remember more. “She dyed her hair once. I remember that. Her dad didn’t like that. He didn’t like that at all.” He looks at us as though we should know what he means.

  “I don’t remember that. Didn’t she always have the same hair colour?” Michael asks.

  “Nope, she dyed it. Her dad hated it. It wasn’t a good scene. We didn’t see her for a few days. Then when she came back, her hair was back to normal.” He looks from his father and then back to me, as though he’s trying to get us to read between the lines.

  We let the silence surround us as the snow softly falls on the ground.

  I still don’t really have a plan. I have an idea. I ask Michael for help one more time. “Michael, can I ask a favour? Do you have a vehicle I can borrow, something that might drive a little better in this weather than my car?” I point towards my rental car, sitting on the street.

  He doesn’t hesitate. I suppose some of it is his conscience, but I have the impression that he’s the kind of a man who’d help a stranger out in almost any situation. He quickly organizes the boys to bring an old pickup truck around to the front, and it’s decided that we’ll drive in a convoy, back to the motel, me in the rental, Michael in the truck, and the boys in the family sedan.

  When we arrive, the parking lot is empty, and Claude is nowhere in sight. I leave the rental car parked in front of the motel room, then jump in with Michael, as he backtracks, and we park the pickup right along the side of the main highway.

  We jump out of the old truck, and he gives me the keys, not asking why I’m leaving it at the edge of the road. The boys sit in the family car, parked behind us, waiting. “It burns a little oil, but it runs great. And there’s some weight in the back of it, from the wood piled there, so you should have good traction, but wait till tomorrow, or you just won’t get through.” He’s talking about the truck, but keeps looking at me, making no attempt to go join his sons. “We’ll give you a ride to your motel. It’s probably a mile’s walk to get back there.”

  I shake my head. I want to see exactly how long it’ll take me to trudge through the snow, with my bandaged leg. Somewhere, my plan is becoming clearer. I shake his hand, but he still doesn’t turn to leave. He has a questioning look on his face. “She told you it was me. She told you I was the father. I wonder why. I wonder why, me?”

  I want to give him an answer. I want to somehow make him feel better, but I have the same questions myself, so all I can do is guess. “I suppose that there was a time when she trusted you, liked you.” It still doesn’t add up for either of us, and he keeps staring at me. “I don’t know. Maybe she knew this would happen. She must have known that I’d come to you, com
e to see you. Maybe she wanted to give you another chance. Maybe she knew that you’d help me.”

  He looks down at the ground, as the snow keeps falling around us, and when he looks up he seems to be himself again. He passes me a small piece of paper, with numbers scribbled on it. “It’s my number, my cell phone number. Use it if you have to.” I take the number from him and watch as he turns and walks away, before jumping into his vehicle and driving off with his sons.

  It takes ten minutes, walking quickly in the cold, to reach the motel. I open the door of the parked rental car, and slam it a couple of times, until I see Claude at the window of the office, peering out at me. I half-heartedly wave at him, trying to appear distracted, hoping that he didn’t see me walking down the highway. I walk deliberately to my room. I want him to know that I’m here.