The Case Against Owen Williams

by Allan Donaldson

  “I told her I didn’t want her goin’ to no dance hall,” Coile said. “And what did she say?”

  “She lied,” Coile growled. “Like she always does. She said she was goin’ to the movies. But she never went to no movies. I knew she wasn’t.”

  “Mrs. Coile,” Drost said, “I can understand your being worried, but it looks to me as if your daughter has simply run away.”

  “But she ain’t taken none of her things,” Mrs. Coile said. “I know she wouldn’t leave without her things.”

  “She could send for them. Or come back for them later.”

  “But where could she go?”

  “To some of the relatives you didn’t check maybe. Or to some friend you don’t know about.”

  “One of them men she meets at that dance hall,” Coile said. “Brick Smith and his crowd. She thinks I don’t smell liquor on her when she comes back. She thinks I’m a fool.”

  “Okay,” Drost said, “I’ll see what I can do, but I’m short-handed, and I can’t spend a lot of time. And I have to tell you that I can’t make your daughter come back here if she doesn’t want to. It might help if you could give me a photograph.”

  While Drost sat at the table and Coile stood looking out the window, Mrs. Coile went upstairs and came back with a snapshot. It showed two girls and a boy standing in front of a verandah.

  “That’s Sarah on the right,” Mrs. Coile said. “And her friend Vinny. I don’t know who the boy is.”

  Sarah looked a little like her mother but without the disfigured lip. She was also bigger than her mother, taller apparently, fuller, her heavy bosom accentuated by a blouse that was tucked tightly into her skirt.

  “Okay,” Drost said, “I’ll take this for a few days. Now describe her.”

  Sweating inside his tunic in the heat of the kitchen, Drost got out his notebook and took down the details that the photograph wouldn’t tell him. Five-foot-six, maybe. Brown hair. Brown eyes. No moles or scars. Left-handed. Dressed up for the dance in a white dress when she left.

  He was weary of this, but dutifully he spent another half-hour getting the names and addresses of relatives and friends Sarah might have gone to.

  “What do you think’s happened?” Mrs. Coile asked.

  “I think she’s run away,” Drost said. “It happens all the time. She’s legally of age. She can do whatever she wants.”

  “She’s a whore, that’s what she is,” Coile said.

  At five o’clock the sun was still high, the afternoon heat undiminished, and Drost felt sticky and irritable. Having stopped at the Pages’ on the way back to town to find out what Vinny might tell him that she had not told Matilda Coile, Drost now sat facing Private Owen Williams across a folding trestle table in a small room at the armoury.

  “I understand you know a girl named Sarah Coile,” he said.

  “Yes,” Williams said, “I’ve met her.”

  Drost studied him, waiting for more than that for an answer. Williams seemed nervous, but that, Drost knew well enough, meant nothing. He had come to the armoury with the idea that Williams might have set Sarah up somewhere as something more than a dancing partner, but he had needed only one look to make it clear to him that Williams would be incapable of anything so daring. Drost judged him to be nineteen or twenty, but with his bitten fingernails and his scared eyes, he seemed more like a grubby high school student than anything else.

  “Where have you met her?” Drost asked.

  “At dances.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  Williams hesitated, and Drost saw him calculating and wondered why.

  “Last Saturday night,” Williams said. “At The Silver Dollar. What’s the trouble? Has she done something?”

  “No. We just want to locate her, that’s all.”

  “She works at the dairy in town,” Williams said.

  “I know that, but she hasn’t been there since last week. And she hasn’t been home either. I thought you might have some idea where she might be.”

  “No,” Williams said. “I haven’t seen her since Saturday night.”

  “When did you last see her there? What time?”

  “I don’t know,” Williams said. “I danced with her a couple of times, and when intermission started, she said she wasn’t feeling good and asked me to walk with her a ways.”

  “And?”

  “We went outside. There’s a shortcut she knew through the woods back of the dance hall, sort of a trail, and after a little ways that came out onto a road. She said she lived just a little ways up the road, and she would be all right now.”

  “So she went on by herself?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you? Did you go back to the dance hall?”

  “No, I went back to the armoury.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Her parents say that she didn’t come home, and she hasn’t been home since. What do you make of that?”

  “I don’t know,” Williams said.

  “Do you think she might have been meeting someone else?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe saying she wasn’t feeling well was just a way of getting rid of you, so she could meet someone else,” Drost suggested.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you watch her walk up the road?”

  “No. I just went down the road the other way to the main road. I stopped at the canteen out there for a soft drink, and then I walked the rest of the way back here.”

  “And you haven’t seen her since? You haven’t heard anything about her? No one around here has said anything?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see her dancing with anyone else?”

  “Yes. Once with a young guy. I don’t know his name. And once with a guy named Huddy. He was in a fight out there a couple of weeks ago. And once with a guy named Brick who was there with her friend.”

  “You seem to have watched her pretty close,” Drost said.

  Williams flushed and shifted in his chair.

  “Do you think she might have been more interested in one of them than in you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She didn’t say anything about going somewhere else after the dance?”

  “No.”

  “Did she say anything about what things were like at home? She didn’t say anything about wanting to run away or anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Nothing much,” Williams said. “Just about the dance and the people there and stuff like that.”

  Drost looked at his watch and then at Williams, wearily. This was a waste of time, he thought. The whole thing. He got up.

  “Okay,” he said. “I guess that’ll do, for now anyway. If you hear anything about her from anyone, I’d like you to let me know.”

  He went down the hall and out onto the street past the guard, one of the rotation that stood out there uselessly twenty-four hours a day with an unloaded Lee-Enfield .303.

  Tomorrow, he thought, he would give Hooper the list of names he had got from Matilda Coile, and since Hooper enjoyed driving around the country so much, he would send him off to see what he could find out.

  Drost sat at his desk. Constable Hooper stood in the middle of the office, all regulation six feet of him, handsome, blond-haired, scrubbed, clipped, square-shouldered, the very image of everybody’s image of the Mountie. Near the window that looked out at the jail, George Carvell, high sheriff of George County, slouched in an armchair tipped precariously against the wall, a tall, casual man in his late forties with a prominent scar across the left side of his forehead, the only outward damage that had been done to him in his year and a half in the trenches.

  Drost had met him the first day he had taken over the Wakefield detachment the previous October. It had been Carvell’s habit to drop in on Drost’s predecessor, as the mood took him, for a talk and a coffee, and he had simply continued t
he habit with Drost. At first Drost had been polite but distant. He didn’t want to antagonize the sheriff because he had learned as a good Mountie that you don’t antagonize people if you can help it. But as a good Mountie, neither did he like the idea of a non-Mountie hanging around his office, listening to the traffic.

  It had gradually dawned on Drost, as it must have dawned on his predecessor, that he needed Carvell more than Carvell needed him. There wasn’t a person, a house, a farm, a road, a woods track in George County that Carvell didn’t know about or couldn’t find out about in an hour. Without him, Drost would still have been floundering helplessly, struggling to extract even the most innocent information from people whose minds became vacuums the minute he stepped out of the car in his uniform and addressed them in his Upper Canadian accent. Without Carvell, he would still have been blind and deaf.

  So there Carvell sat that July afternoon with his legs stretched out as if he owned the place, and it never crossed Drost’s mind or Hooper’s not to say what they had to say in front of him.

  “There’s nothing,” Hooper said. “Not a thing. Nobody has seen her. No one knows anything about her. I went to every name on the list except one that I couldn’t find, and I went to some other people that they said might know something about her. Nothing. I went to the railroad station and the bus stop. Nothing. Nobody had seen anyone like her.”

  “Do you think that she might have got on a train or a bus without them noticing?” Drost asked.

  “That’s possible, I suppose,” Hooper said.

  “But Matilda Coile said she didn’t take any of her clothes,” Drost said.

  “You said she had a fight with her old man,” Hooper said. “Maybe it was bad enough that she didn’t dare go back for her clothes. Maybe he threw her out.”

  “Maybe,” Drost said. “It still seems odd though.”

  “Maybe she’s set up with some guy and doesn’t want to be found,” Carvell said.

  “I wondered about that too,” Drost said. “I wondered if maybe she’d been set up somewhere by Williams. But he’s not the type. He’s a child.”

  “He’s the last person who saw her?” Carvell asked.

  “The last person we know who saw her,” Drost said. “He said she told him that she wasn’t feeling well, and he walked her to the Hannigan Road and left her there.”

  “Maybe she did go home,” Hooper said.

  “And then?”

  “She had another fight with her father.”

  “And then?”

  “I don’t know,” Hooper said. “I was just thinking.”

  “What do you know about Daniel Coile?” Drost asked Carvell.

  “Nothing that’s new,” Carvell said. “That place he lives on is the family place. The old man died a long time ago. Dan had a lot of brothers and sisters. I don’t know where the brothers went. Some of the sisters are married and live around here. Dan’s wife came from out near the border, and the talk is that Dan married her because he had to. I guess they were a pretty rough crew out there for a while. They drank, and Dan used to knock his wife and the kids around. But he’s slowed down, and a few years ago, the wife got religion, and I haven’t heard much about either of them lately.”

  “What about the daughter?” Drost asked.

  “I don’t know,” Carvell said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if she were a little like the mother at that age.”

  “I wonder what I should do,” Drost said. “I don’t think I’d better put out an alert this soon, but it’s beginning to look funny. I wonder if I should go out to the dance hall and look around. Just so that everything’s done right before I start the rumours flying.”

  Carvell looked at his watch.

  “I’ll come along,” he said. “Nice day for a walk in the country.”

  The Silver Dollar was a long, wooden, one-storey building standing in a ragged clearing of dirt and weeds that had once been part of a farm, now failed, vanished, and mostly overgrown by bushes and small trees. From the front peak of the roof a round sign, painted silver, hung out over the front door with the name, The Silver Dollar, printed around the edge. The centre of the sign had been decorated with a couple of dozen bullet holes of assorted calibres and one charge of bird shot fired at close range. The door was closed, and there were shutters on the windows, not to keep out burglars, which they wouldn’t have done, but to dissuade the local bucks from shooting out the windows.

  Drost parked at the back out of sight of the road, and he and Carvell got out. There was no one around. Drost had been out to The Silver Dollar often enough at night but never during the day, and the quiet seemed unnatural. Instead of the usual uproar of music and rage, there was only the backdrop of bird calls and somewhere, everywhere and nowhere at once, the intermittent shrillness of a cicada.

  They walked from the dance hall back towards the woods and entered along one of the trails that led out of the parking lot, following the route that Williams had described to Drost the day before. At what had been the edge of the original, much larger clearing, the overgrowth of bushes gave way to taller evergreens, and then the track came out into a long, narrow clearing that was growing up in bushes and small evergreens.

  “This is the end of the Birch Road,” Carvell said. “The land here wasn’t any good, and the road was just left to grow up. It comes out over that way onto the Hannigan Road.”

  “This is where they went, according to Williams,” Drost said.

  They wound their way through the small trees. A little further on, they came out onto the Birch Road proper although it still wasn’t much of a road, more dirt than gravel, with a strip of weeds down the middle. A quarter of a mile or so from the back of the dance hall, they emerged onto the Hannigan Road.

  “This is where Williams says he left her,” Drost said. “She went off up the road towards home, and he went down the other way.”

  They stood and took stock. To their right, toward the Bangor Road there were houses, and Drost could see a woman in an apron standing on a front porch watching them, her eye caught no doubt by his uniform. To their left, the Hannigan Road swung away uphill toward the Coile place. Fifty yards from where they stood it was joined by another road that ran away from them eastwards back towards town. This was Broad Street although it wasn’t broad here or anywhere else. But then neither were there any birch trees on Birch Road nor had anyone named Hannigan, so far as anyone knew, ever lived on Hannigan Road. On the upper corner of the intersection of Broad Street and Hannigan Road, there was an abandoned church and its graveyard. Drost and Carvell crossed the road and wandered, more or less aimlessly now, up past the end of Broad Street and turned into the graveyard over a crude cedar-log culvert.

  The doors and windows of the church had boards nailed across them, and the graves around it were untended, overgrown, as if their occupants had long passed out of memory. At the back of the churchyard beyond a weathered cedar-rail fence, the ground dropped away sharply through a tangle of alders and chokecherry bushes. A couple of hundred yards away, where the ground rose again, Drost and Carvell could see through the trees the roofs of some houses and a squat church steeple roofed with sheet metal that shone silver in the sun.

  “You can’t see it from here,” Carvell said, “but there’s an old gravel pit down there where people sometimes go to drink. Do you want to have a look?”

  “Okay,” Drost said. “Then we’ll go back. I’ll let it sit for a day or two, and if she still hasn’t turned up, I’ll put it on the wire.”

  They walked back out of the churchyard and around onto Broad Street. Down the Hannigan Road, the woman who had been watching them from her verandah had been joined by another woman and an old man. A hundred and fifty yards along Broad Street, they came to the road that led down into the gravel pit. It was more a track than a road. The grass had begun to creep into it from the edges, and there was a deep channel down the middle where the rain was eroding it away. There were recent car tracks all the same, straddling the erosion cha
nnel.

  The pit didn’t look big enough ever to have been a government or commercial operation. More likely it had been used by farmers as a source of gravel for their own driveways, but it didn’t look as if anyone had hauled out of it for a long time. The ground in the middle was still bare, but grass and weeds and small bushes were growing around the edges under the broken banks, which like the road were eroding away, exposing the roots of the small hardwoods at the top. In some places, the banks had collapsed completely, so that instead of a cliff face, there was now just a slope on which stood in some places the dead, whitened trunks of trees that had been brought down when the bank collapsed.

  It was perhaps that broken earth, those whitened skeletons of trees, stirring remote associations, which made Carvell recognize almost at once what the smell was that hung in the air.

  It was nearly seven-thirty when Hooper, standing beside the patrol car, saw the two cars and a small van approaching up the Hannigan Road. Hooper’s face was still pallid, the faded freckles of his child- hood showing through his tan. He had been violently sick earlier, and he felt vaguely sick still and also humiliated.

  Below him in the pit, Carvell was sitting in the shade on a little ledge of earth that had slid down from the top of the bank, grass and all, and formed a kind of natural bench. Drost paced slowly, obsessively, around in the middle of the pit, looking at, without really seeing anymore, the scattered testimony of the pit’s social life. Bits of paper and boxes, most of them soaked and dried and bleached, though one Sweet Caporal cigarette box looked new. Bottles, some whole, most broken. Black Diamond Demerara Rum, Moosehead Ale, Sharpe’s Pure Vanilla Extract. A couple of French safes. Some dried shit.

  At the western end of the pit towards the abandoned churchyard, partly screened by high grass, in a little hollow among some of the older piles of earth from the collapsing bank, a green canvas tarpaulin was spread, its corners held down with stones. Above, among the trees between the churchyard and the edge of the pit, Drost could see figures moving again, three men this time, creeping forward as if stalking something.