by David Hood
Baxter’s chin eased back. He checked his tunic as if it might have holes from the shots just fired. He cleared his throat and spoke as evenly as he could. “I know that a firm hand has made things better here than they used to be.” He would continue to take his direction from a higher authority. Real strength was expected to endure the weakness of men like Martin Tolliver.
Tolliver put his hands in his pockets but his voice was still hot and full of lead. “And change has been peaceful because our leaders have not been heavy-handed, they’ve coaxed people along. That’s all I’m asking you to do here, be reasonable, do what’s best for the city.”
Baxter slammed the door on his way out.
He stood in the hallway outside the chief’s office, every face in the station staring back at him. It would have been that way even if he had not slammed the door. Now that he had, the worst was expected. He felt called to answer for a decision that was not his. What exactly had just happened? He was not sure he knew. He looked across the main office, past the front counter where Meagher and two other officers were pretending to be busy, past desks where he was the only thing going on, to the doorway of his own office where Squire was standing. He turned and looked down the hall toward the front door that led into the Grand Parade and an entire city full of eyes. How did men like Wallace and Tolliver and Victor Mosher look with straight faces into those mirrors? If he went out there now which reflection would he see, his own or theirs? He moved toward his office, afraid to look at the image that was about to appear.
From the first step he became invisible. Suddenly there was the sound of typewriters and telephones, of the clock on the wall and the scraping of chairs and voices back and forth. And he moved with the tide.
Squire had let him pass without a word, then followed, closing the door behind him. Baxter sat at his desk and Squire waited. When Baxter was finally able to look, he was relieved to see nothing more horrible than curiosity in the young man’s face. Squire broke the silence. “We all saw Wallace leave a few minutes ago. You could have heard a pin drop in this place. Did he do it?”
Baxter worked slowly, removing his tunic and handing it to Squire. It got hung too quickly. Baxter motioned for Squire to sit, holding on a few moments longer as if it were Squire’s comfort he was waiting on and not his own. When he finally spoke it felt like the lancing of a boil. “It appears that Victor was the victim of a robbery, most likely at the hands of a sailor who has now left the city. That’s what the police investigation, our investigation, will show. Or something along those lines.”
Squire’s chair caught fire. He stood over the desk, his hands in the air. “That’s completely untrue and you know it. Look what I found. We can use this on Wallace.”
Baxter took the paper Squire handed him and read it. “Please find enclosed payment for your assistance in arranging council for Mr. McNeally. I will accept an additional invoice for your services in arranging a donation to the city’s benevolent fund. Signed M.S. Wallace.”
Baxter pushed a slow stream of air through his lips. If the first wave of settlers hadn’t found a few friends among the Indians. If the French had done better against the British at Louisbourg or Quebec. If Victor had been luckier at cards. If this, if that, he thought. History was nothing more than random chance and timing. “Where did you get this?” he finally asked.
“Thomas Berrigan. Turns out he’s the one been swiping clothes. That hat, it didn’t come from his brother Patrick, it came from James Seabrook. That was tucked under the sweatband.” Squire had picked up the hat that had been sitting on the chair beside him. He offered it like an hors d’oeuvre. Baxter waved it off.
“That’s good police work, Mr. Squire. However, Mr. Wallace has confessed.”
Squire pointed, his face red hot. “Then what’s he doing walking out the front door?”
Baxter sat straight up in this chair, looked straight ahead, more in Squire’s direction than at him. “Now that depends on who you ask.”
“I asked you.”
Now his gaze was more direct. “Here in the privacy of my office, I think he is walking out the front door having presided over his own trial, condemned himself to freedom, and has gone home to begin serving his sentence.”
Squire shrugged his shoulders in obvious frustration. “Is that some kind of riddle?”
“Absolutely not.” Baxter was as flat as Squire was up in the air. “Maynard Sinclair Wallace murdered Victor Mosher. He confessed to that very fact. Told us he stabbed Victor, showed us a cut on his hand he got in the process.”
Still flabbergasted and now curious, Squire asked, “So was it over the tramway or the gambling or both?”
“Neither one. Wallace killed Victor to save Sarah Riley.” Baxter could see his answers were not helping.
“To save her from Victor? How does that make any sense?”
“How do you think?” Baxter waited, knowing this wouldn’t help either, unless moving Squire from anger and frustration to another point of sadness could be helpful.
“Was she…?”
“She told him that night. According to Clarke, Victor showed no reaction at first, sent Miss Riley to get him a drink, then came looking for her with a knife.”
Baxter watched Squire’s eyes narrow. He watched himself be judged and waited for the verdict. “You knew all this before you sent me to her family and you kept it from me.”
“No, Mr. Squire, I kept it from them.”
If the nod meant what he thought it did, Squire recognized the need for silence until now. “Wallace killed a man to save a woman who killed herself…she did kill herself?”
Baxter was glad not to have to deliver any worse news. “The medical examiner found no evidence to the contrary.”
“It’s not possible…”
“Wallace had anything to do with it? I don’t think so. And I don’t think Victor Mosher or Miss Riley would be dead or have even met each other if it were not for Maynard Sinclair Wallace.” Baxter said what he felt, because he couldn’t keep from saying anything else.
Squire’s hands went into the air. “Then surely he goes to jail for something?”
Baxter looked toward the chief’s office as a way of indicating that his sarcasm and disappointment was not directed at the young policeman in front of him. “If you are concerned with justice or public opinion, then yes.”
“But?”
“If you are Chief Tolliver, you are likely whispering in the mayor’s ear as we speak, words like compromise and reasonable and greater good.”
“And what does that really mean?”
Baxter sank back in his chair. As much as he didn’t want to, he knew he had to answer. And he knew each word of explanation would deepen his feelings of complicity and guilt. “It means that Wallace has already made some sort of deal with Clarke. It means that once the chief is finished with the mayor, there will be a short telephone call. Then sometime soon money that would have been invested in a tramway will find its way into city schools and a certain widow and her children will discover an estate much larger than expected.”
Squire picked up the note Baxter had let fall on the desk. He waved it in desperate defiance of the greater facts. “What about this, with everything else we have?”
Baxter looked at Squire and saw himself in front of Tolliver. He wanted desperately to be on his side, to have something encouraging to say. “I’m afraid not, Mr. Squire. Our reports can wait. I’m taking the rest of the day. I recommend you do the same.”
Squire looked at the note, at the hat, at Victor’s attaché and ledger, at the newspaper clippings and reports and the other bits and pieces of the case still lying about the office, things it took a week without sleep to find, things that mattered until a moment ago. Then his face sagged. He dropped the note into the hat and tossed it on the desk. “Meagher would pitch a fit. He wants me back on patrol yesterday.”
“You don’t belong to him anymore, you belong to me, Detective Squire, and I’m telling you to take the rest of the day.”
“I don’t know what to say, Chief Inspector…I don’t know if I…”
“It’s not always like this. Go home, rest up over the weekend. Monday we start fresh.”
The air was cool and very still. The grey sky, the flat steel sea, the colourless trees and dull boulders ran past both sides of his vision in a blur to a pinpoint on the horizon. Baxter stood staring at it from the beach at Point Pleasant under a tree. Behind him the noon gun fired its noise from the fortress on the hill. The reverberations passed through him and died and the scene before him remained unchanged.
He spoke his mind uninterrupted to Victor and Wallace and Martin Tolliver. He put all of them in their place. There are higher immutable truths. Every compromise is proof of that. He would not aspire to mediocrity. He spoke an apology to Mr. and Mrs. Riley and took some responsibility for what their daughter had become and for not being able to save her. Later he would write a letter. In the sorrow and the anger of his solitude he cursed Charles Clarke and Ellen Reardon. He took some solace in the fact that Detective Squire would now be dealing with the likes of them. Better him than Mackay. At least that much good had come of this.
An abrupt gust of wind came off the water. His shoulders hunched against it and his eyes teared up. As if driven by the wind, his thoughts came back upon him. Where was he within his faith? He was a regular at Mass. He was generous to the collection plate. He made time for charity events. Bigotry hurt him, particularly from High Anglicans like Wallace. The question remained. Was he really the good Catholic he claimed to be? He was beginning to tremble. He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself, and was instead struck by thoughts of death and an image of his body with the medical examiner. And then came thoughts of nothingness, of not being, of not knowing anything that ever was or was to come. He crouched down on the shoreline, huddling against a fear that was much colder than the wind.
Why thoughts of death, why now? Like any man his age he knew he had more past than future. He could look back with joy. He had earned the respect he carried. His wife had remained at his side and been all the things a good wife should. His child was grown, intelligent and kind. He had much to be thankful for. There was no more wind yet his chill grew worse, his trembling more violent. The damp salt air had gone inside his clothes, inside of him. There was no movement on the water or in the sky. Up and down the beach and in the trees behind there were no signs of life. He was alone.
He tried to look ahead, find some company and some comfort there. He saw Grace waving, waving in goodbye. He looked to Jane for help and found her on their daughter’s side not his. They seemed doomed to grow apart. Where were Squire and the chief and his great reputation? They were there, just as he had left them. The harder he looked at them, the more he saw himself. And what did he see? He saw a man running out of time.
The cold and the trembling were now joined by a pain in his stomach. Not a sick feeling, more as if he had been kicked or maybe even stabbed. He tried to force his arms against his body to subdue the pain or stop the bleeding. They were too weak. He leaned more forward in his crouch and toppled over, the beach rocks driving into his knees. He lay there cold and trembling in a ball and he began to pray. He prayed for time to win his wife and daughter back. He prayed for time to find a way of bringing Wallace in. He prayed for time to teach Squire the things he needed him to know. And he prayed for his time to be the chief, for the city on the hill. He prayed, he prayed aloud, he prayed with his heart and with his life, he talked to God, he beseeched him. He prayed and listened and still he was alone.
He wept in his forsakenness. His pain and cold turned into a numbness of the body and the mind. He listened to his breathing, and for what seemed like a very long time he thought of nothing else. It was the incoming tide that eventually stirred him with a splash in the face. He watched a second small wave come in and crash and creep towards him. He made it to one knee then fell over, his legs still too stiff to straighten. He breathed and waited a moment for more blood to circulate then tried again.
He stumbled but managed to get off the rocks without falling again. By the time he had followed the pathway out of the park, his stride was almost normal. Children were getting out of school. The sounds of work drifted up from the harbourfront. The sun was poking through the clouds. Now and then a flash of golden light came off a window. Baxter moved along unnoticed.
Near Spring Garden Road a tram stopped just ahead of him, people got on and off. Two workmen waved and parted.
“See ya tomorrow, Jimmy.”
“God willing.”
Baxter stopped. A wave of realization and shame and clarity came over him. “God willing,” Baxter repeated as the man moved past.
“God willing,” the man said again, nodding at Baxter then looking up into the sunlight and walking on.
He walked slowly the rest of the way home, not because he was still cold and sore. He walked in sober thought. It was not God’s will he had been following, it had been his own. Clarke, Wallace, and Tolliver seemed to have recognized his vanity, perhaps his wife and daughter had as well. Everyone except him. Pride had been his fall. It was not up to him to judge, to be the arbiter of sin. It was not God’s will that Wallace escape trial. That was not it. It was that Baxter had lost sight of himself, lost sight of grace. That was what he had to accept. Better still if he could also learn to accept the city without giving it up.
The evening meal was more balm than salt. He let it be known the case was closed and said little more than that. Jane complained that the pickings had been slim at the shops and blamed it on the war. Grace shared the highlights of the Drummond lecture. Everyone trod lightly. He tried to help with the dishes, a gesture that was disallowed by a majority decision that his day had been the hardest.
He was sitting at the bench in his workshop, the pieces of the rocking chair exactly where he had left them on Sunday night. The tools were there as well, untouched. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Mother. Did you remember to pick something up for tomorrow?” Grace kept her voice low, but still glanced back over her shoulder as she spoke.
He covered his face with his hands then muttered between his fingers. “I promised myself…I must have thought of it a dozen times.”
Grace pulled one hand away to show him what she had in hers. A sardonyx shell cameo of Flora, goddess of spring, trimmed in gold. “I found this in a shop on Granville Street. What do you think?”
“It’s lovely.”
“I’ll wrap it up then and put your name on the card.”
“Better it come from you.”
“I’ll write both our names.”
“Promise me something.”
“Father?”
He had put it between the folds of a towel and ironed it as smooth as he could. The envelope was new. As he passed the signed application to his daughter he asked, “Promise me that as soon as you graduate you won’t be in a hurry to leave this place. We’ll always be dying here. We need nurses more than doctors. But stay anyway, stay for as long as you can.”
There was a release of excitement and tears and hugs that brought Jane from the kitchen. In the time that followed there were apologies and promises and plans and visions that were at the same time dependent and inevitable. Jane was the first to leave. While she prepared a bath, Grace and her father found paper and made a pretty present. Then Grace hugged him one last time and ran off to read.
Tired as he was, he did not want to go upstairs. Baxter reached for the pieces of the rocking chair. As he worked his mind drifted. Had the girl Elizabeth taken the room in Squire’s boarding house? He had forgotten to ask. He would have to tell Meagher that his making due without Squire was permanent. Tolliver would not resist the promotion. The back of the chair was held together with a number of sc
rews and dowels. He had put them in a small paper bag. Nevers was probably right, the gazebo would need painting in the spring. One of the screws was bent. He looked for a new one. Maybe the gazebo could wait. It would not be needed for anything special. None of the new screws were the right size. He would not wake up to find himself in the Garden of Eden this spring either. Acceptance would not come easy. He would have to straighten the bent screw. He held it firmly against the bench with his thumb and reached for the hammer.
He could hear Clarke laughing.
Acknowledgements
Writers work alone. They succeed with the help of many others. Sue Goyette and Shandi Mitchell encouraged me to write and led by example. Lynda Millar and James Collier read the first draft. Lynda’s comments helped give me the confidence to finish what I’d started. James had a great feel for the story. He pushed me to work harder, and this book is better than it ever would have been without him. Shelley Hudson also read for me and patiently corrected my spelling. Patrick Murphy had faith enough to go to publication. He also connected me to Kate Kennedy, who did a fabulous job of editing.
