“Look, Ellis, a deal is a deal, and the deal is that you help me with Kezia in exchange for my helping you with your inquiry. I’ve done that, haven’t I?”
Of course she had. Without her I wouldn’t have been able to talk to Mark and without Mark, to talk to Feeance.
“Yes, Aliana. Yes you have.”
“Well unfortunately, at the moment, Kezia and the gang issue go together. Anything else?”
“I talked to Feeance Blake.”
“The female member of the Fearsome Four?”
I had to smile. Aliana was back to being her friendly self.
“Yes. A very impressive lady.”
“Woman.”
“Woman. I also had an interview with a Dr. M.M. Singh.”
“At the coroner’s office?”
Did she know everybody? “Yes. He told me that there were two small marks on the Juicer’s body that he wasn’t able to identify conclusively. I can’t get my mind off the idea that Tasers might be involved here.”
“There’s been no mention of that,” she answered, “but if you think there’s the least chance, I can do some to research on the subject. Give me a couple of days.”
I was about to end the conversation when Aliana got to what it was that she really called to say. “Ellis, I’ve got a couple of things for you. The first is that Mark was apparently the first on the scene the night of the incident. I got this from one of the duty nurses at the hospital. She recognized Mark from the night before when the Juicer had also wandered outside. She said that a few of the hospital workers saw Mark struggling with the Juicer. Everybody agreed that he was just trying to get him inside, especially since it had started to rain. The Juicer must have been unusually cooperative that night, because he eventually went inside without much trouble.”
“I have to think about this, Aliana. What can it mean?”
“I’m not sure. On the surface it just means that the night the four accosted the patient, he was just being exceptionally difficult.” She stopped for a long moment. I could almost hear her thinking over the phone. “You know,” she said, this whole thing depends on motive.”
“Doesn’t any murder depend on motive?”
“Yes. That’s the trouble. If there’s no motive, doesn’t that mean there’s no murder?”
“What it means is that I have to find the motive.”
She had no answer for that. “There’s more, Ellis, there’s something else I have to tell you.”
“Yes?”
“I’m afraid I have some bad news about Kezia. She’s apparently gone missing. She’s been absent from school pretty much since the day we visited her. She hasn’t shown up for her after-school corrections program, and when I tried to visit her at home, I encountered somebody who could only have been one of the ‘bad brothers’.”
“Oh, no.”
“Yes. I checked the Scarborough juvenile detention facility and also a couple of the ones downtown—a few hospitals, too, but no luck. I even attempted—unsuccessfully--to talk to her mother.”
“What about the police?”
“That’s the first thing I tried. The officer in juvenile told me that they had so many reports of Kezia disappearing in the past that they no longer took them seriously.”
“I find that hard to believe, Aliana.”
“Believe it. Do you know how many children and teenagers there are in this city who spend a great deal of their time unsupervised?”
I didn’t want to try to answer that. “Leave these things with me. I’ll give them some thought and get back to you.”
She hesitated for an instant. “Want to discuss them over coffee?”
“Let’s wait and see whether I come up with any ideas. In the meantime, I still need to chase down the other two cops I want to talk to.”
“Brownette and Downs?”
“Right. Do you know them?”
“Not yet,” Aliana answered.
I could tell by the tone of her voice that she’d be getting back to me on them soon if only to have an excuse for that coffee. As this thought hit me, another one did, too. Who the hell do you think you are?
The thought that Kezia was roaming the city on her own was deeply disturbing. That night, as I lay awake in my usual struggle to stop thinking about everything, I recalled the day that I had met Kezia and how interested she had been in my life beside the river. I had promised her that I would tell her more about it, and I had intended to, but the opportunity to speak with her again hadn’t presented itself. The thought that she might be gone was certainly not one that encouraged me to go to sleep.
I remembered that she had been particularly interested in the fact that the river froze. It had not always been capable of doing so. In the past, contamination from factories in the valley as well as pollution from the cars that sped in an unrelenting stream along the Don Valley Parkway that ran beside it, had raised its temperature so that it had never got below the freezing point.
But things were different now due to the dedicated work of volunteers and the commitment of City Council to clean up the Don. It was capable of freezing again, though never as completely as it had once done.
I remembered Kezia’s astonishing ambition to write a book about ice and snow, and that thought brought to mind the cold wind that had assaulted us the day I’d visited Jeffrey and talked to some of his clients.
If there were ever a time of year when a person interested in the freezing of the river would be likely to be down in the valley, it was now at the fragile line between autumn and early winter.
I recalled the recent sensation of being followed as I had ascended from the village in the valley to my apartment. Could it possibly have been the girl—working on her so-called project or maybe even up to something else?
It was a far-fetched idea. Besides, Kezia lived distant enough to the east of my neighborhood to be near a different river altogether, the Rouge, which, like the Don, ran south toward the beaches of the lake.
Perhaps, I thought, the idea of her exploring the Rouge was less unlikely than of her being in my own neck of the woods.
I decided to venture out into a couple of the ravines to the east just to check as to whether by some stretch, Kezia might have a reason to be exploring out there.
The valley of the Rouge was nowhere near as familiar to me as the valley of the Don. Though I had managed to find spots in the Don valley so isolated that I might have stayed there for months without my presence being detected, for the most part, the further south you went along that river, the more developed it was until, at its mouth, it was pretty much an urban jungle.
Where once old factories had smoked and clanked on the banks of the Don’s mouth, there were now towers of condos so dense that it was impossible to see past them to the waters of the harbor beyond. But you knew the harbor was there because of the traffic: boats and cranes and delivery trucks and thousands of cars. There were huge stores down there selling food and liquor. There were entertainment complexes and clubs and offices.
But not at the bottom of the Rouge. Here a wide wild bay lined with woods led the eye smoothly to miles of sandy beach. It was possible to stand near the mouth of this river, to stare straight ahead and to think you were in a wilderness undiscovered by the people of the city of four million that you could see in the distance if you looked the other way.
Not knowing the valley, I couldn’t take a chance of venturing too far away from the path that led along the river.
Once I was down there amid the thick trees beside the wide stream, I realized the folly of my idea that wandering in this place would lead me to any information about the fate of the young girl I sought.
It was cold, and I was tired. Since I’d lost Queenie, I seemed to have lost a lot of other things, too. And chief among them was energy. When I thought of the days—of the years, really--that I had spent wandering beside a river like this, it appalled me that now I became exhausted after only an hour or so. I turned to walk back the way I had come
, back to the parking spaces and my car.
It wasn’t until I was nearly on the animal in my path that I realized it wasn’t a dog.
Of course, in my time in the valley, I was fully familiar with the wildlife down there. A number of times I’d seen deer, but I suspected they were gone from the valley now. And of course I’d seen rabbits and squirrels and snakes and rats. I’d seen feral cats and dogs and even a couple of guinea pigs. But I had never seen a coyote.
I was aware of their presence in the city, aware that people were afraid of them and made no attempt to befriend, tame or adopt them. I was as frightened of the idea of confronting a coyote as anyone was.
But clearly the coyote was not afraid of me. He stood directly in my way, in the middle of the path. In the autumn light, the shadows of the surrounding trees played on his coat, which was thick and shiny and though similar to a dog’s, fuller and more variegated than that.
He seemed to look right into my eyes, and his own were a shade of green that reflected the green of the surrounding fir trees, of the river, of the lake beyond the path where we stood confronting one another. His wide, bushy tail swayed in a narrow arc between his slender, balanced legs. He had the snout of a wolf, only shorter and the facial expression of a creature afraid of nothing—especially not afraid of me.
I, on the other hand, was terrified. Like a lot of people in Toronto, I had heard stories of coyote attacks—of cats and small dogs killed in an instant in the snap of powerful jaws, of babies snatched by mothers seconds before being carried away, of old people swinging out with useless canes to chase the beasts away.
I was frozen. If I turned and ran, surely it would run after me. Maybe I was supposed to walk slowly toward it, but I lacked the courage. My heart began to pound and I wondered, wildly, whether he could hear it and realize that I was afraid enough to be dragged away despite the fact that I was so much larger than his usual prey.
I don’t know how long we stood like that. Long enough for me to note the smooth sound of the river rushing toward the lake. Long enough for me to hear the honking above me of a vee of Canada geese heading south. Long enough for me to think for one brief moment of how Queenie would have laughed at me for being such a coward.
As if the thought of her had somehow broken the spell, the coyote’s head shifted a fraction of an inch, and I realized that he had suddenly lost interest in me as a target. I heard a barely-audible rustle in the bushes behind my back. Then the coyote darted forward with such speed and strength that the wind of his running rifled my clothing. I turned and saw him dashing away from me. In his mouth was a tiny rabbit exactly the same brown and white shades of the rabbit I’d seen in my own valley.
***
In the end I decided that my adventures in the valley of the Rouge had told me nothing except that I loved the valley of the Don, even with its surrounding buildings, its highway, its crowded mouth, more than I could ever love another river—another landscape.
Though it was quite cold, when I got home, I decided to walk in the valley for a while.
In places not far from my building, the river was quite shallow, and I could see where people had thrown things in—shoes, even shopping carts, but the further up I got, the cleaner the river was and I was soon walking along clear, sparkling waters only interrupted now and then by early ice that had formed close to the shore.
I was studying that when I was suddenly confronted by a pair of fellow wanderers on my familiar path.
Directly ahead of me I saw a homeless man that I recognized. He was a harmless old soul possessed with a certain amount of naive charm. And helping him walk along the path, as if he couldn’t do it alone—though I knew he could—was Kezia.
I had no idea how she had found my valley, but she was a clever girl who knew how to research, based on what she had told us about the computers and the library. There were detailed maps of the valley online and there was also, of course, a people-finder app that could tell her exactly where I lived. She could have even seen a picture of the place on Google earth.
I considered confronting her, telling her that she should be in school rather than roaming around the city in the company of questionable old men.
Instead I slipped behind some shrubbery that had not lost all its foliage and observed the two, ready to break in on them if I saw the least sign of any impending impropriety.
But as I watched, I saw that it was not just Kezia who was helping the old man. He seemed to be helping her. She was asking him questions about the river and the weather and the temperature and she was actually taking notes in a little book!
I figured she must be working on the project she had told us about, her book about ice and snow. The sight of her intensity was downright inspiring. I remembered then what she had said about her brothers being in the habit of destroying her work, and I wished I could offer her a safe place to work and to keep her materials.
But that, of course, was out of the question. The best I could do at the moment was to leave her alone.
But I wasn’t comfortable with this decision and I got back up to the apartment as quickly as I could.
I called Aliana.
“I think we need to get in touch with Child Services,” she concluded.
“They have a file on Kezia already,” I answered.
“Quite a thick one,” she replied. “But whatever they’ve got on her, they haven’t taken her into custody.”
“Into care,’ I corrected.
“I’m afraid if we contact them, we might never see Kezia again,” Aliana said.
“I know. But I don’t think we have a choice.
“And,” I added, “we’ll never find out what the secret was that Mark Hopequist told her.”
We both laughed gently at that. If a cop had told a kid a secret, it was bound to be some harmless thing, some tidbit of advice like “Only cross the street at the lights and you’ll never get run over.”
Child Services politely thanked us for the information about Kezia. “That was it?”
“Yes,” Aliana answered. She paused for a second. “Ellis, let’s get together. I’ve got a lot to tell you. How about our Tim Hortons?”
“Where we almost got shot? Are you sure we should?” I didn’t know what made me more afraid, the thought of being gunned down or the thought that Aliana thought there was an “our” coffee shop.
“I talked to Matt West about that, and I’m sure you did, too. There’s nothing to connect the incident to us. And besides, lightning never strikes twice….”
“Unless you’re still standing under the same tree in the same storm.”
She looked much younger than her years in her red coat and her white “eternity” scarf, an unending circle of white wool that wound around her long neck and set off the darkness of her thick hair. Her wearing a red coat and sitting near the window, which she insisted that we do, made me pray that Matt was right about our not being the intended object of gun-wielding Torontonians.
“So, what’s up?” I set a large latte in front of her and took the seat across from where she sat.
“I’m working on a series of articles about the world affairs summit. The full twenty member nations have given final confirmation of attendance, and we’re getting close. It’s in a couple of weeks.”
“Right.” I had no idea what this had to do with me.
“This isn’t a freelance deal I’m working on. It’s an assignment. That means I’ll have full media credentials. I can interview anybody that I can get near at any time. Including any police officers who are assigned to the event itself, to the preparations that are taking place all over the city, and even those guarding dignitaries and their staffs.
“Congratulations, Aliana. I’m happy for you. But I don’t see why you brought me here to tell me this.”
“Didn’t you tell me that you ran into Ted Downs at a demonstration about the impending conference?”
“Yes, but that wasn’t an official event. It was just some keeners getting
ready for their big day….”
She actually rolled her eyes. “Ellis, there is not one thing that is going on in this city that is in any way connected to the world conference that isn’t subject to the same police attention. Part of the reason that our friend Matt West is so upright most of the time is that he’s second-in-command of the biggest police team ever put together involving our police. And it’s not just Toronto police. They’ve got an amalgamated force from around the province, from neighboring jurisdictions, from the Ontario Provincial Police and even the RCMP.”
“They’ve got the Mounties involved?”
“They’ve got everybody involved. From the top guns, so to speak, to the little guy in the trenches.”
“Which would be our Ted Downs?”
“Which would be our Ted Downs.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The next afternoon, I picked Aliana up at her downtown condo, a glass tower overlooking the harbor, and we set out for 52 Division, a police station in the north central section of the city on Eglinton not far from Yonge. We had to park several blocks south of the station on a side street lined with typical old Toronto homes, two- and three-story brick buildings that had once spelled middle-class respectability with their orderly dormers and their stately porches. Where once had lived prosperous but ordinary families, there now lived people who had a million dollars to spend on a three-story brick house.
Aliana was in reporter mode. She talked in clipped sentences and seemed to think that it was appropriate to give me orders. “There will be no recording of the interview, so we’ll have to keep cell phones out of sight.”
“Do you mean we’re going to sneak a recording?” I asked. I felt like some sort of junior and the feeling made me angry, which I made sure I kept hidden. I wanted to talk to this cop and I didn’t want anything to stand in the way, including—especially—pride.
“Of course not!” Aliana snapped. “We are going to take notes. You take yours and I’ll take mine. Later, if you want to, we can compare, though a lot of what I want to discuss with Ted Downs concerns the security measures being taken for the conference and won’t involve you or your issues.”
Don't Forget You Love Me Page 13
