The Night Bell

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  ] 16 [

  Thursday, October 25, morning

  At their appointment earlier that week, Dr. Pass had suggested a visit to a neurologist in Mayfair, a specialist in aging and changes in the brain. After making a phone call, he wrote a referral and marked it URGENT. “Most people have to wait months for a visit with Dr. White – I can get you in Thursday morning at eight.”

  However, after she’d made some scrambled eggs and toast, Hazel found her mother unwilling to get out of bed. “This is ridiculous,” she told her. “Adults don’t behave like this.”

  “I’m taking a stand,” her mother protested.

  “Would you accept this kind of behaviour from anyone?”

  “I’m not anyone,” Emily snarled. “I am your mother.”

  “That’s correct. And, right now, my mother needs to get her skeleton out of bed so I can take her to see the nice doctor and then go to work.”

  “What’s her field?” asked Emily. “This nice doctor.”

  “Gerontological neurology.”

  It took further cajoling, but eventually Hazel was able to get Emily dressed and feed her a couple forkfuls of egg before leaving the house. Emily took forever to lock the front door and then she turned around and saw Hazel had brought her cruiser. “Mother of Jesus,” she snarled. “Are you taking me in that goddamned thing?”

  “I’m on duty, Mom. But we can go fast.”

  “How fast?”

  “I can punch it to one-fifty on a straightaway.”

  Emily got in and sat glowering in the passenger seat, and Hazel had to do her seat belt for her. Then they headed towards the 41, passing the turn-off to Port Dundas where the new headquarters was going to go. A banner hanging between two stanchions on the prow of land below the granite cliff read:

  FUTURE HOME OF SOBEYS SUPERSTORE,

  ROOTS, GALAXY CINEMAS AND MUCH MORE

  ON THE MAIN THOROUGHFARE OF WESTMUIR COUNTY

  and

  THE NEW HEADQUARTERS OF THE

  ONTARIO POLICE SERVICE, NORTH–CENTRAL DIVISION.

  Deputy Commissioner Charles. S. Willan

  GROUNDBREAKING OCTOBER 30, 2007

  “An abomination,” said Emily. “Main Street will be dead in two years.”

  “Just think: if you could drive straight north from Toronto and have all your needs met without ever having to pull off into some ratty little town, wouldn’t that be wonderful? How much you want to bet there’ll be a McDonald’s here in six months?”

  In the rear-view mirror, Hazel saw the outcrop of scrub with two roads joining in front of it. One led to the heart of Port Dundas, the other would soon be applied like a garrotte to the throat of the town.

  “When you get to my age, try to stay out of doctors’ offices,” Emily said. “They are employed by government forces to make people shuffle off their mortal coils, thus saving the economy billions a year.”

  “It would be nice to put an end to that plot.”

  “There’s no plot. When it’s your time you don’t have any say in it.”

  “You talk like I’m driving you to your execution.”

  “You could be,” Emily said. “Too bad it isn’t covered.”

  Hazel had read recently in a not-entirely disreputable women’s magazine that sometimes when people expressed negative feelings they weren’t looking for advice or a counterpoint, they just needed someone to hear them. Someone to listen. And listening was easier than responding to the carping. She would try harder to hear what her mother was saying.

  The clinic was in a house at the end of a rural road outside Brigham. Aspens in full colour hung over the roof and there was a basketball hoop at the side of the house. It had a calming effect. By the time Emily was welcomed into the doctor’s office, all the fight had gone out of her. Sooner or later in your life, you have to put yourself in someone else’s hands. Just surrender. Hazel watched her mother being walked away. A small figure following a white coat down a hallway.

  The magazines were atrocious. They were a contributing factor to the ongoing fall of civilization. The television suspended from the ceiling played a game show silently. The grand prize was plastic surgery. No one should be surprised by anything people may be capable of, including competing on television for a new face.

  Her phone rang. Ray Greene. “Brendan Givens is dead.”

  “What?” She went out into the hallway.

  “Stabbed to death in a hotel room. Yesterday. In Toronto.”

  Toronto? “And who caught that case?”

  “Fifty-one Division.”

  “God. I feel like we’re on the losing side of a game of keep-away.”

  “Did you look into the complaint I left for you?”

  “The racket ruckus on Fraser Street? I put Eileen Bail on it. She won’t punch anyone.”

  “Then what have you been doing?”

  “I haven’t been in Tournament Acres.”

  “But you have been …?”

  “Doing research.”

  “On?”

  “These boys lived in our county, Ray. They weren’t even given the courtesy of an unmarked grave, they were … murdered, incinerated, and their remains were scattered in the corn. They have a right to their names.”

  He moaned something unintelligible. “You’re as reliable as tides, Hazel. You don’t have a case, but someone says no to you and you see a red cape.”

  “You can’t stop me from reading public files.”

  “Is that what you’re doing?” Silence. “You’ve got Wingate on it, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know, I got a pretty furious phone call –”

  “From Michael Wingate? He tore me a new one, too. Don’t change the subject. James has the names of six boys who vanished off the public record after doing a stint at Dublin Home. Six candidates for murder. There’ll be more. All we have to do is attach a name to one victim and we have the foundation of a huge case.”

  “How do you propose to do that?”

  “Find a relation. Do a DNA test. And, um, well …”

  “Well what?”

  “I’ve actually already found a relation. Deacon sent someone to get a hair sample. They can get markers in three days to compare to the results Deacon’s lab got on the bones.”

  “Do you have an assignment for me?”

  “What do you mean?” A nurse entered the hallway and gestured for Hazel to come through.

  “I mean, since you’re still obviously in charge, what do you want me to do? Should I go down the chimney at Fifty-one Division and steal the file on Givens?”

  “I might have something for you later.” It made him laugh, but she knew he was mad as hell. Before he could form another objection, she said, “Nothing on Renald?”

  “Nada. How do I know he didn’t disappear on your say-so, huh? Maybe you have him out there dressed up as a Mountie.”

  “I gotta go, Ray.” She went back into the doctor’s office. Emily emerged from the back with Dr. White in tow. Her mother wore a look of frank triumph.

  “Not a thing wrong with me. Tell her.”

  “Hello Hazel. Nice to see you again.”

  “Nancy.” Her eyes shuttled back and forth between her mother and the doctor. “So we’re to carry on?”

  “Come back here for a minute, and we’ll talk about it in private.”

  Hazel followed Nancy White, but her mother stayed behind. “You don’t want to be a part of this conversation?”

  “I’ve seen all I need to see back there for now. I’ll wait out here with the hopeless cases.”

  Dr. White’s office was the standard-issue professional inner sanctum, with diplomas and wood accents and a steel lamp on the desk. “People weren’t meant to live into their nineties,” Dr. White said. “What’s happening to your mother is normal. She forgets, she remembers, she’s herself, she’s not herself. She’s been working with that brain since she was in her mother’s tummy. Things get old.”

  “What about the myeloma?”
Hazel said with half a smile.

  “It could be contributing, but it doesn’t really matter. There’s no sense in pathologizing the aging process – not all of us are lucky enough to have one! But we do live in an era of options and one of those options is drugs. I could, for instance, put your mother on five milligrams of Aricept. Good drug. My father was on it. I think it kept him going, cognitive-wise, maybe an extra year or two.”

  “Do you have a drug that can make me forget stuff?”

  “I know of one, but it’s around three hundred dollars an ounce.” They both laughed. “We don’t know very much about the brain, I’m afraid. We go at it with the equivalent of boxing gloves on.”

  Hazel had begun to feel heavy. “Can we think about it?”

  “Of course.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Your mother? She asked me if I could euthanize her with Jim Beam.” They both laughed again, but Hazel found herself snorting back tears.

  ] 17 [

  A Mountie leaning against his cruiser at the corner of Sam Snead and Pebble Beach held up his hand to stop the approaching OPS cruiser. Hazel rolled down her window to report she had an appointment with the CO up in the command truck. She didn’t, but the Mountie read her warrant card and let her through anyway.

  Hazel drove up and parked her car. The RCMP remote command vehicle was an RV decked out in red, yellow, white, and blue. Stairs led up at one end and down at the other, like a haunted house at a county fair, but with Mounties in it.

  She walked up to the door marked IN and knocked. The big, bearded man who answered smiled at her. “Ya?” He dried his hands on a white tea towel.

  “Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef. OPS. I was wondering who the commanding officer here is?”

  “That role falls to me. Superintendent Martin Scott. Come in. Which OPS?”

  She stepped up into the vehicle. “Port Dundas.”

  “That nearby?”

  “Not too far.” It was a single room inside, complete with red carpeting. There were a few desks and a white eraser board on one wall. A kitchen and a curtained-off area took up the far end. It smelled of sock. “We were actually on the case here. You know about … the bones of the kids, and also the dead couple. The Fremonts. Do you know about them?”

  “I do.”

  “Is that your case?”

  “Sort of. Tea?”

  “Sort of?”

  “I can only make small talk, Detective Inspector. Tea?”

  “Do some of you live in here?”

  “There’s always someone on the barge,” said Scott. “And we’ve got one guest in the cell.”

  “You have a suspect?”

  “No, I have Mr. Givens’s secretary. Justine. She got apoplectic.”

  Hazel looked at the near end and noted a locked door flush with a particleboard wall. “And you locked her up?”

  “She’s tanked.”

  “Can I see her?”

  Without hesitation, Scott tossed her his keys. “Green key fob thingy.”

  She went to the door and unlocked it. Behind it was another door, a steel one, with a large, barred window in it. A woman was sleeping under a Hudson’s Bay blanket on a comfortable-looking cot. “Justine,” she called. “Hazel Micallef. Everything OK in here?”

  “I threw up.”

  “All right, sweetheart. You can probably leave now if you want.”

  “No,” she said, and Hazel heard the sound of her throat working. “I think I’d better stay here a few more hours.” The girl sat up partway and blew her nose. “I can’t believe he’s dead,” she said. “He was gonna take me to see the horse circus.”

  “Get some rest.”

  She closed the outer door and locked it. She walked back and put the keys into the palm of Scott’s outstretched hand. “I’ll have tea.” He was rugged-looking, about fifty-five, with a barrel chest, and his bushy beard was starting to streak grey under his mouth. “Superintendent Scott, are you aware that one of our officers has been abducted?”

  “I am. I’m sorry. I understand there isn’t much progress just yet.”

  “It’s hard to carry on an investigation when the crime scene is locked down by another police force.”

  He was in the little galley, busy swirling hot water into teacups. The cups – Royal Doulton, she was sure – looked silly and small in his paws and he wore a look of engrossed concentration. He swirled water in the teapot, too. “It feels sometimes like the world is coming apart at the seams. A cup of tea helps.”

  “I’m not sure Sergeant Renald would agree with that sentiment,” she said. “Are you doing anything in those fields?”

  “There’s not much in the way of shovelling going on right now,” Scott said. “Our instructions are to keep the site secure. When they saw you lurking around, we were told to lock down every corner. Which we have carried out with ruthless efficiency.” He smiled.

  “You knew it was me?”

  “I think it only took one phone call.”

  She wondered how good a policeman he was. He had a soothing manner that was also charming, in a practised way. She’d missed a few words; he was still talking: “… would have seen him by now. We’ve inspected every dwelling in the development. And we’ve checked every ID. Your sergeant is not on these grounds.”

  “How do you know he’s not under them?”

  “If he is, then I’m afraid the investigation into his death would be ancillary to our current command.” He held both cups aloft in their saucers and splashed a bit of tea into them. Hazel reached out to take one.

  “Which is what, specifically?” she asked.

  “Which is to collect evidence.”

  “Well, we have similar aims.”

  “But at cross-purposes.”

  “Why is the RCMP taking over this investigation?”

  “We have not taken anything over, Detective Inspector. We’re on our own investigation.” The door to the command centre opened and a young woman in uniform entered. She saw Micallef and Scott sitting there together and she apologized, and left.

  “You’re not investigating the unrecorded murders of children from fifty years ago? You’re here for another reason?”

  “I wish I could tell you more.”

  She put her teacup down on its saucer and pushed it away. “I wish you could, too,” she said. “You’re impeding my investigation. You’re not even keeping it alive. I’d like to know what for.”

  “I would like to tell you. But I can’t.”

  “God. I’ve always found you guys inscrutable, you know?”

  “Us guys? We are also women and dogs and horses.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if you’re just pretending in those shiny uniforms of yours.”

  He looked at her steadily for a long count. It made her feel she shouldn’t blink. “I assure you,” he said, “we are not pretending.”

  She rose and pushed her chair away. Its feet bumped awkwardly backward over the red, tight-pile carpet. She reached out, a little stiffly she thought, to shake his hand.

  “It’s true you have to watch out for the horses,” he said to her at the exit. “They are both inscrutable and mischievous. Come back if you like. Command is lonesome.”

  James Wingate spent his Thursday in the archives and he was home by six with copies of complete personnel lists for both boys’ homes between 1951 and 1960. He faxed them to Hazel, and once they’d both had their suppers, they sat on the phone together and went over the data.

  “Get this. One of the physical education teachers at Charterhouse was named Greer Knockknock,” he said.

  “Do you see any personnel who shuttled back and forth? Listed at both institutions at the same time maybe?”

  “I haven’t looked.” They both heard papers being shuffled. “Tell me,” said Wingate. “How much of this do you think went on? Crimes like this, ones we only discover by accident?”

  “You shudder to think what’s under the ground anywhere. I had an aunt who lived in Tun
isia. She had six mummies in her garden.”

  “I have some contacts in Renfrew now … I’m dying to ask them to sniff around the local history. But if they’ve got anything in their fields like we do in ours, they’d be smart to keep a lid on it or maybe they’ll get their case snatched too.”

  “I don’t think our case has been snatched,” Hazel said. “I met the guy in charge down there. Martin Scott. He was pretty straightforward about the situation. His position was to be very kind and polite and also immovable. But he did tell me their case is not the missing kids.”

  “The Fremonts then?”

  “He wouldn’t confirm it. But why would the RCMP be interested in people like the Fremonts?”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Bit players. Those homes went for under a quarter of a million, most of them. What kind of criminal enterprise was Oscar Fremont in that paid off this poorly, but the RCMP would investigate?” Wingate arched his eyebrows. “The Fremonts – and everyone else on that cursed bit of land – are sideshows to a sideshow, and the RCMP is doing something altogether unconnected. Or connected in a way that’s not obvious. Scott acted as if the discovery of the bones created an opportunity for them.”

  “Let’s keep going,” he said.

  She heard him turning pages but she had no idea where he was in the document when he started talking. “There’s some commonality, besides oversight, between the two homes in the time frame we’re looking at. A couple of administrators, a bookkeeper, some medical and nursing staff. I think there might have been a provincial circuit for the docs because these records show their salaries were paid separately by inhibition. Institution. Very small amounts, though. In 1958, this one – Harald Groet – was paid two hundred and seventy-five dollars by Charterhouse and three hundred by Dublin Home. That’s not a lot for a doctor even in 1958, don’t you think?” She heard him tapping on a keypad. “Three hundred bucks in 1958 is like two thousand now.”