The Night Bell

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  “It wouldn’t take very long.”

  “He’s in a wheelchair, Detective.”

  Hazel tried to see around Mrs. Eppert, but she reacted by moving her hips to block her view. “What if you tell him Leon Cutter sent me? Maybe he’ll talk to me then.”

  “Wait right there,” she said, indicating a tile on the floor. She disappeared into the house and then there was silence. After a minute, she returned. “He’s got five minutes, OK?”

  She led Hazel into a spacious front hall. An empty chair lift was at the bottom of the stairs, ready to take someone up its track to the second floor. “He had an accident down on Beech Road five years ago,” she said sotto voce. “Collided with a Canada Post van. He’s not the same person. Rene? Sweetheart?” she called. “Can you meet me in the den?”

  She beckoned Hazel down a hall. A man in a wheelchair navigated toward them using a little stick shift on the arm. His head was thrown back, as if he were about to catch a peanut in his mouth. “This is Detective Inspector Micallef, from the OPS.”

  “How do you do,” said Rene Eppert. She’d expected him to speak with difficulty, but his voice was clear. She wasn’t sure where to look. “Will this take long?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Coffee?” Mrs. Eppert offered, and they both said they’d have a cup. Her husband gestured to an open doorway, and Hazel went into the den and found a seat that wouldn’t cause her to sink too much into the cushions. He parked across from her.

  “How do you know Leon Cutter?” she asked him. “And what’s his birth name, if you know it.”

  “Lionel Couture.” He tried to lower his head a bit, but the best he could do was to lay it on his shoulder. “His bed was in the same dormitory as mine.”

  “And you were friends.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Why did he send me to talk to you?”

  Eppert looked uncomfortable. “To let me know he’s keeping his promise.”

  “To you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And to Rex Clemson and Hibiki Yoshida?”

  “I don’t know either of those names.”

  “What about Claude Miracle?” His eyes jumped away. “You knew him. And Eloy?”

  “Claude is alive?”

  “You know Eloy is not?” He didn’t answer. “You were a ward of the province of Ontario at the Dublin Home for Boys from 1951 to 1958.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you go after 1958?”

  “I was eighteen. I was on my own.” The coffee arrived. His mug had a lid and a bendy straw sticking out of it. “I got a job in Uxbridge. I met Helen.” His wife put a warm, proprietary hand on his shoulder and fitted the coffee cup into a harness. He turned to suck.

  “Did you stay in touch with any of the boys you knew there? Did you keep in contact with Cutter or anyone else?”

  “I haven’t spoken to Couture in almost fifty years. And no. Why would I want to know anyone from that time? If you’ve been looking into the history of that place, then you know what it was.”

  “What was it, Rene? In your own words.”

  “An abattoir.”

  Helen Eppert’s left eye started to twitch. “Inspector, I don’t want Rene to –”

  “Do you remember the names of any other boys from back then?” Hazel asked.

  “I remember a lot of them. Orman Vadum, Jimmy Tirana – Italian – a bunch of black kids and Indians, the Miracles, Sammy Rideout. Ronnie Morristown –”

  “Charles Shearing?”

  “Yes.”

  Hazel took a sip from the mug. The coffee was merely warm. She imagined this was the hottest it could be for him. “Do you know how Eloy died?”

  “No. One morning he was gone.”

  “Did you hear or see anyone in the night?”

  “No. I heard the bell and I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep.”

  “The night bell.”

  “At the back of the home. The front entrance had a buzzer, but the back door had a small brass bell over it. The door struck it when it was opened. It was a little jingle, very distinctive.”

  “But if you heard it, you knew that someone had come into the building. And you would be scared?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was it?”

  “You didn’t dare look. Maybe that was the reason he took someone. Because they looked at him.”

  She’d taken out her notebook, hoping he’d continue to talk freely. “Was there anyone at Dublin Home who frightened you? Among the staff?”

  “All of the adults. You were never shown a moment’s compassion in that place.”

  “How did Eloy die?”

  Eppert took a deep breath, as if he was going to hiccup, and he moved his upper body to get upright. It threw his head back farther. “You had to keep your group small in that place. At one point in the … in the fifties, there were almost two hundred of us in Dublin Home.”

  “Do you know how any of the missing boys died, Rene?”

  “He’s told me some of the things that happened there,” his wife offered, to speed things along. She was watching him with a worried, tender expression. “I’ve told him that a lot of people write their memoirs and get them published. It lets the public know the truth about something that’s important.”

  “M-may-m-maybe I will some day,” he assured her.

  “Did you know any of the medical or nursing staff? Did you ever go see the nurse, or get sick? Kids must have gotten hurt from time to time.” Hazel read from the papers in her hands. “What about Dr. Donald Rosen?” Eppert made a cancelling sound in his throat. “Frank Inman? Harald Groet? Frances Kelly? Nothing?”

  Rene Eppert was making an effort to bring his eyes down. He pulled his skull forward, but his eyes stayed rolled up as if they were locked to some point in space. “I don’t … I don’t. Know.” He swallowed hard. “Those names.”

  “Inman was at Dublin Home for over twenty years, Rene. You must’ve seen him at least once. What about Peter Lynch?”

  “Idaknow.”

  “Dale Whitman?”

  “No,” he said, in a strangled voice.

  His wife leapt up. “Oh my god!”

  Eppert’s left hand sprang open and he said “Oh oh oh!” like he was having a panic attack.

  “He’s seizing,” Helen Eppert said, trying to hold his arms down.

  “Oh, I have a nurse!” Eppert crooned. His irises swelled from pinpricks to nail heads.

  “Is it Whitman?” Hazel asked him urgently.

  His hand jammed on the joystick and the chair rumbled toward a wall. Helen pulled his hand off the stick and righted him. “I’m sorry Detective, but that’s all for now I think.”

  “He’s scared. Rene? They’re all dead. No one can hurt you now.” Eppert shook his head spastically. “Did you know Dale Whitman? Did you know Peter Lynch?”

  Mrs. Eppert pushed her husband out of the room. “Please see yourself out –”

  “He knows something! What do you know, Rene? Who was killing children at Dublin Home?”

  Eppert’s head ticced violently over his shoulder, a physical stammer that denied knowledge of what had brought on his terror and shut him down.

  At the station house, Ray brought both Hazel and Fraser in for a debriefing. Wingate was overstaying his hours again, but he was not in uniform, and Hazel had him looking through name change records on a provincial database. If Cutter had been Couture, were the trio of names he’d given them authentic? Clemson, Eppert, Yoshida? Wingate confirmed that all three of them appeared in the Dublin Home records under the same names. Wingate asked her if he could sit in on her and Fraser’s debriefing with the skip. She told him he couldn’t.

  Ray Greene agreed with both of their assessments of the case: Cutter wouldn’t reappear until they’d gone through all the hoops, and that meant locating and interviewing Yoshida. Hazel had already tried the number for him she’d found, via Motor Vehicles. He wasn’t home or he wasn’t answering. If he
was where he was supposed to be, someone was going to have to make the two-hour drive to Dunneview. They agreed Hazel would continue to call.

  She briefed both of them on her interviews with Clemson and Eppert. “I’m going to look more closely at the medical and nursing staff. Someone who knew what was happening, but has never told. There’s got to be somebody who can tell us about the other people who worked there.”

  “Are you concluding it was someone on staff at the home?” Ray asked.

  “No. Not concluding. But my interview with Eppert ended with him literally seizing up at the mention of some of the doctors’ names.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Peter Lynch and Dale Whitman.” They both wrote the names down. “I knew Dale Whitman. He was a GP in town, and his daughter and I were the same age. We went to school together.”

  “Do you think it could be him?” Fraser asked.

  “He was a nice man. He was well respected in town, and he was a presence in the community. But I always did get a strange feeling in their house. It had cold, stone floors downstairs that I didn’t like, and there was gas lighting all through the house. They lived there together, just the two of them. Gloria’s mother died when she was nine. But could Whitman have killed children?”

  “Well?” said Ray.

  “Anyone is capable of murder,” she said after a pause. “We know that better than most.”

  “Is he still alive? Or his daughter?”

  “I don’t know about either of them. I’ll check. Gloria and I kept in touch by letter for a year or two after high school, then she went to Toronto for work. I think she tried modelling for a while. I don’t know when we stopped talking, but I think it was mainly my idea.”

  “Would you rather someone else locate her?”

  “No. I’ll look her up,” she said. “Her father is probably dead, though. He was in his forties when I last knew him.”

  “Maybe you could just call Cutter for the information,” Fraser said.

  “Haha,” she replied, flatly. “I don’t know if he’s that far ahead of us. He might have gotten to this point – to thinking about medical staff. But I think Cutter wants proof.”

  Fraser scoffed. “Maybe he’s forcing Renald to work the case inside a locked closet.”

  “Renald isn’t a detective. Cutter left us all our detectives. He took Renald to force us to solve the crime.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then justice?’ She shrugged. “Listen to me. Cutter’s known the shape of this case for decades. He needed us to start pulling on the threads. So now we’re his puppets because one of our own is at risk. He calculated well.”

  “Oh shit,” said Ray Greene, slapping the tabletop. “Maybe Cutter has been reading our minds. Renald’s radio was found destroyed. But what if he got Renald to …? Goddamn it.” Greene picked up his phone. “Melanie? Ask MacTier if Melvin Renald has logged onto any of our servers since his disappearance. I want to hear back from you in sixty seconds.” He hung up. “Fuck.”

  Silence fell on them and Hazel found herself staring at Ray’s phone. Her eyes fixed and it began to blur and throb.

  “Cutter could be in Quebec City by now,” Fraser whispered.

  “No. He’s nearby,” she said.

  “How do you know that?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him like he was some species of idiot. “Stop whispering,” she whispered. “He’s nearby because he wants to be ready when we find our man.”

  “Or woman,” said Ray. “Maybe there was a crazy nurse in that place. Why does it have to be a man?”

  “Sensitivity training has worked wonders for you,” Hazel said as Ray’s phone rang.

  Greene spoke. “Yeah … Uh-huh … OK, thanks. I’ll come out and talk to you in a couple of minutes.” He hung up. “He’s been logged on remotely since the night of his disappearance.”

  Fraser began to offer excuses right away for why no one had thought of it. “It couldn’t have occurred to any of us that they were using Renald –”

  “MacTier is going to log him off and change his password.”

  “You don’t think that could put him in danger?” Hazel asked. “You don’t want to make Mel unnecessary.”

  They all thought about that for a minute.

  “We can get MacTier to redirect his logon to a dummy site and falsify its updates,” Ray said. “And, just to be safe, we should all switch to another secure channel when we’re discussing our movements. MacTier will find us a frequency. Do everything else on the regular channels.”

  “Should we feed some false information down those channels?” Fraser asked. “Maybe match it up to the bogus updates?”

  Ray held up his hand: STOP. “MacTier will call you with the new channel. And Hazel?”

  “Yes?”

  “Send Wingate home.”

  ChemLab Forensic in Toronto had two more unnamed bodies for them based on their DNA testing of the bones. This brought the total to eighteen victims. The Maracle DNA was still being run. By three in the afternoon, all the weekly reports were done. Eileen Bail had gone down to the cacophonous dispute involving the music school and explained to both parties the importance of getting along. Maybe so-and-so could do this, and so-and-so could do that, and everyone would be happy. She reported that both took her advice, but not without one more verbal lashing from each of them trying to get the last word. “Men,” she said.

  Yoshida didn’t answer his phone.

  Wingate got ready to leave, finally, at four – four hours after his shift ended, and two hours after Ray had told Hazel to get rid of him. He insisted on an update before he went home. “So I can keep thinking about auctions at home this weekend. Actions,” he spat, trying to correct himself and failing. “Options.”

  “Those are fairly limited right now,” she told him. “Dale Whitman died in 1965. I’ve ordered the certificate, but I have the listing. I can’t find Peter Lynch. Whitman had a daughter and she’s still alive. She’s a hairdresser.”

  “Why are we not actively looking for Leon Cutter? Every hour that passes keeps Sergeant Renald in danger.”

  “We’ve talked about this,” she said. “We’re assuming a wait-and-see attitude over the weekend. It’ll give me time to talk to this Hibiki Yoshida first, I think.”

  “When are you going?”

  “As soon as buddy answers his phone!”

  “Hibiki is a strange name,” he said. “How does he spell it?”

  She laughed. “I imagine he spells it the way all the Hibikis spell Hibiki.” She spun her computer screen around so he could see. “But he goes by Hiro.”

  ] 22 [

  Saturday, October 27

  Hazel did her normal Saturday shift, but the case was quiescent, as if lying in wait, saving its strength for the next wave. Cutter was silent now and Yoshida unreachable. She had an urge to go up to Dunneview anyway. Yoshida didn’t know what she’d discussed with Eppert and Clemson; that information was only in her notebook. Unless Cutter had wired their houses. Unless they were all in on it. How many people might it take to stay ready for fifty years, to see justice done? His or their methods suggested justice wasn’t enough. They had raised the bones to the status of holy relics: sacred objects that could not be touched except by a priest. Or the police. The murders of innocent homeowners were ritualistic in this way, cleansing and vengeful.

  It was becoming increasingly clear why and how the boys’ killer had chosen his victims. He was practising the ultimate form of birth control: removing genes from the gene pool. What did the three identified dead boys have in common? The younger Maracle was an Indian possessed of uncommon strength; perhaps he had been an easy choice. Deasún was a simple boy, of Slavic or Irish origin, based on her searches. Big as well. Shearing was dark enough to look black and maybe that was enough to get you crossed off this person’s list. It was pure eugenics. Their release into society would likely have meant the continuation of their line.

  She felt some relief that Dale
Whitman was dead. Lynch was probably dead, too. Or he would be in his nineties.

  If any of the other doctors were living and findable, she hadn’t turned them up. However, on Thursday Wingate had tracked down one of the nurses who’d worked at both Charterhouse and Dublin Home. Frances Kelly was living in Toronto. James had had no trouble getting her on the phone, but she’d declined to discuss Dublin Home right then, saying she had her hands full with her sister, who was dying of MS. She offered to call after her sister was asleep. But she had not called Thursday night, nor Friday, and James had turned her name and number over to Hazel.

  Wingate wouldn’t be in again until Monday. Recently, he’d been protesting how infrequent his shifts seemed; this case had made him hungry to get back and he was raring to go. Hazel promised she’d talk to Ray about it, but this was just to put him off for a while. She knew he wasn’t ready. It wasn’t just his cognition (as evidenced in his malapropisms) or his physical deterioration. She recognized a drug addiction when she saw one. She’d had her own battle with painkillers, and she knew he was living on pills. It showed in his eyes, which were sometimes merely tired, but at other times glassy. (Michael may have had him on organic vegetable juices, and who knows what other supplements. Whatever it was, was it any worse than the pills – plural – she saw him popping into his mouth almost every day?) She knew Ray was aware of the changes in his detective sergeant. He wasn’t going to clear James for normal duty until he was cleaner than he was now.

  Cleaner. That was an achievable goal. She’d stopped taking painkillers because, eventually, they’re something you have to give up completely. But she still drank. Not a lot, but she drank. So did Ray, and so did Geraldine Costamides and Dietrich Fraser. First you saw things, then you drank. She was still of a mind to give James the greatest amount of slack possible – to let him do whatever he needed to do – and to trust Michael to keep an eye on him. She wanted to spend more time worrying about James, but her mind was trained on dead children.