Rehab Run

by Barbra Leslie

  Dickie Doyle was Laurence’s assigned roommate at Bennington, a random pairing that wound up surprising them both, and everyone else, by lasting through all four years of school. Dick was straight, an economics major, and on the lacrosse team, and although his family was full of drunken micks just like ours was, his drank at country clubs instead of the Legion. Despite the sports, Dickie was quiet, introspective, and a bad fit at Bennington, but his parents had hopes that mixing with all the artsy types would smooth out some of Dickie’s rough edges. And they were right. By the end of his second year, Dick had taken to sporting pink shirts with bow ties and knew the lyrics to several Sondheim songs. Then Dickie met and married Rose, and after a few high-flying years in New York, they’d decamped to Nova Scotia to live the quiet life.

  Then Rose, an avid horsewoman, was thrown from her mount and broke her leg. She was prescribed OxyContin for the pain, and like many good people before and after her, became addicted and needed the drugs long after her leg had healed. And when she eventually found it too difficult to cop pills in this rural area, she realized that everything she wanted was easier to get in Halifax.

  Dickie was never the same. Rumor had it that he came by the facility once a month or so to check in, but otherwise he kept to himself in a cabin he’d built on a small lake a few miles away. While the addicts recovering at his centre showered in beautiful bathrooms and ate fresh, locally sourced food, Dick lived in a small cabin with only sporadic running water and a compost toilet. He chopped down trees for the woodstove, the only source of heat he had, year round. He poured all his money – what he had left from his family, which he had parlayed mostly successfully after a few years of day trading – into Rose’s Place.

  Locals thought he was either a saint or a lunatic. I thought he was probably both.

  “This place is what keeps him going, I swear to motherfucking God,” Mary was saying. Mary could swear better than I could, a feat in and of itself.

  “Maybe it’s a mistake,” I said lamely. “Maybe it’s fake and I was just hysterical.” I knew it wasn’t true. A severed hand is a severed hand, and you don’t have to have hung out in a morgue to recognize one. “The hand, I mean. Like a Halloween thing.”

  “It’s May, Danny.” Mary was looking at the coffee pot. “Fuck, we’re out of creamers I think.”

  I was about to say something about liking it black like my men, some stupid joke, but Evan was walking in the door with two cops from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I heard another siren and saw what seemed like a dozen emergency vehicles coming up the long drive.

  “Armageddon,” Mary said. She crossed herself.

  “Not again,” I said.

  I crossed myself too. I’m not Catholic, but you can never be too careful.

  * * *

  While the police talked to Mary first, I ran up to my room, grabbed my cell, and called Laurence to tell him the news.

  “I heard,” he greeted me, when he picked up the phone.

  “You can’t say hello, like a normal person?” Like many of my family’s quirks, it both annoyed and amused me. Never once had Laurence uttered a greeting into the telephone, either when answering or calling, and I never got used to it. In person he has the manners of a courtly, if snarky, Edwardian gentleman, but on the phone, he’s like a curmudgeonly uncle who’s being charged by the word. Yours and his.

  “Dickie just called.” I could hear him light a cigarette. “Someone called Evan called him.”

  “Since when do you still smoke?”

  “Since always. I just don’t do it much,” he said. “I’m coming up there.”

  “Here?” I said. My voice sounded high and funny. “Why?” I was easing into rehab. For once in my life I was following orders, doing the right thing, and being where I was supposed to be. I was thinking about making collages, and I went for runs. I went to the meetings, even if I hadn’t conquered the Sharing part. I ate with strangers and had not, as of yet, hit anyone. I hung out in the office with Mary and put my feet up and cursed. I did my cleaning rota and didn’t complain. I practiced smiling in the mirror, and the day before at dinner I found myself actually tasting the food and laughing at something.

  But I craved crack so much that sometimes the thought of having to live the rest of my life without it seemed like the cruellest thing I could do to myself. Even the dead parts of myself – my hair, my toenails – missed crack. I would look at my fingernails and think, I know how you feel. I miss it too. It was the hardest thing I had ever done, and if I saw one of my sibs, I thought I would just turn into a bucket of mush and beg for someone to take me home and fix me warm milk and cinnamon toast.

  “I’m needed, Danny,” he said. “I going to get a room at a B and B.”

  “Ha,” I said. The Clearys hated B and Bs, the forced conversation in the morning and the generally uncomfortable feeling of staying at the home of a distant aunt. “I don’t get it.”

  “Nevertheless.” Even for Laurence, this was taking his telephone brevity thing a bit far. “I’ve got to run, Banany,” he said, and I found myself breathing easier. Like the rest of the family, he rarely used my name. I was either Banany, or Beanpole. Or Bean. Or Pole. All this talk of smoking and B and Bs was making me feel like my big brother had been body-snatched. “I’ll come see you tomorrow night.” And he hung up without saying goodbye, like some character on a television show.

  I looked at my phone, checking the number again to make sure that my mind wasn’t playing sober-person tricks on me and that it was my brother Laurence I had been speaking to. I considered calling Darren to mull over these events. Darren was the youngest, and at thirty a semi-retired musician. These days he was living back in Toronto with our brother-in-law Fred and our nephews, twins of nearly twelve. Fred and the boys had been through way too much in the last year, and Darren was busy being full-time uncle. He had enough on his plate. And I was supposed to be doing well in rehab, getting myself clean and perhaps even getting some perspective on the events of last fall. The last thing I wanted to do was phone him with news of a dead hand in a mailbox. This bit of news I would handle on my own. And of course, with Laurence, when he arrived.

  When I went downstairs, the police seemed as highly strung about the whole thing as we all were. Clearly, in this rural idyll, severed body parts delivered into mailboxes weren’t de rigueur. There was even an ambulance outside (to revive the hand? Mary and I wondered). But they wanted to take my blood pressure and look at my pupils and I consented, with the eagerness of the newly-sober, to take a breathalyzer. They explained that I would make a better witness in court, eventually, if they could prove I had been sober when I’d found the hand. I was pretty sure even the fire chief was there.

  And Mounties. Several Mounties.

  “Mrs. Cleary, let’s just go over this one more time.” I looked at the detective, or sergeant as he called himself. He was a tall, bald, slightly doughy man, whose ruddy complexion was even more flushed with what I could only take as excitement. “Starting from when you got up this morning.”

  “Ms. But call me Danny,” I said automatically. We were in the office still, and I was high on caffeine. I studied the man – my experience with police was mixed, to say the least. One had nearly sacrificed his life to save me and my family, and another had seduced me, killed my sister, and shot my brother with a bow and arrow.

  But despite my days of mayhem only months earlier, looking out the window at the kind of soft sunny May morning we were in right now, it was difficult to believe that anything bad could happen. Despite, you know, the severed hand in the mailbox. At least it had nothing to do with me this time, I thought. I’m just another addict here, another person trying to get her life together. Let go and let God, and all that.

  I don’t know anyone here, I kept repeating to myself. I don’t know anyone here. That hand doesn’t belong to anyone I know. It has nothing to do with me or mine. There are bad people everywhere but there are good people too. I looked over at Mary, who was
sitting with her head between her legs again. I smiled.

  “Miss?” the sergeant said, seeing my smile. “Something funny?”

  “Oh God, no,” I said. I sat up straighter. “I’m sorry.” He looked at me, and I could practically see the cogs turning. He was trying to figure out whether I was just some spaced-out junkie, crazy, or had put the hand in there myself. After all, my fingerprints would be on the bag; I had handled it. Handled the hand. I tried not to smile again. “Too much caffeine. I’m having one of those weird opposite reaction moments, you know? Where you don’t know whether to laugh or cry? I mean, how often do you find a hand in a mailbox, am I right? Or maybe you do. Maybe they get delivered all over town here.” Out of the corner of my eye I could see that Mary was sitting up straight now, looking at me. She shook her head slightly, a “shut the fuck up” move if ever I saw one.

  “Uh. No,” the cop said. “Not so much.” He looked at me and there was a kindness in his face. I smiled.

  “What a relief,” I said. “So what do you want to know?” I told him again about my run, probably adding too much detail about what a beautiful early morning it had been, and how peaceful I was feeling. Not relevant, but it was all spilling out. “So I thought, what the hell, I’ll open the mailbox. I’ve been doing that on my runs these last days. It’s become a habit.”

  The cop perked up. “Do you do this every morning?” he wanted to know.

  “Well every morning for the past five or six days,” I said. “I’ve only been here for two weeks.” But who’s counting. I saw the look on his face. “You think whoever did this knew I’d be the one to find the hand, don’t you,” I said flatly. “He wanted me to find it.”

  “Not so fast,” the cop said, and patted my hand, which was shaking suddenly. His name badge read MURPHY. Another mick, I thought. This area is lousy with us. “He probably doesn’t even know who you are. It’s possible – probable, even – that he just knows that people check that box. Or even if he has been watching the place, I’m sure it’s not about you, Mrs., or Miss – Danny.”

  “But it might be,” I said.

  “Oh I suppose it might be,” he said, as though I’d said it was possible we’d be having a solar eclipse today. “Just to do our due diligence, Danny, I should ask you – do you have any enemies?”

  I sighed. “Take out your notebook,” I said. “We might be here for a while.”

  * * *

  Murphy asked Mary to leave the room, and radioed for someone called Jones to come in from outside. There was a throng of first responders, and at the bottom of the hill I could see a CTV news van.

  “Wow,” I said. “Even here.” Murphy looked at me. “Vultures,” I said nodding at the van.

  “Just doing their jobs, I guess,” he said. I snorted.

  I sat down and rooted around in Mary’s desk, found her pack of Marlboros, and lit one.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m going to have to smoke for this.” Murphy nodded and sat down as a young red-haired constable, Jones, I presumed, came in quietly.

  “You may have heard some of this story on the news last year,” I started. “Reader’s Digest version. In November of last year my twin sister Ginger was murdered in California.” Murphy started to say something but I stopped him. “You’re sorry to hear that. I know. Just let me – anyway, I live in Toronto, and I flew down there with my brother Darren. You might have heard of him – Darren Cleary?” Murphy nodded, which surprised me. Redhead grinned, which didn’t surprise me. He looked more like the demographic for Darren’s brand of upbeat folksy rock. I smiled back at him. “Yeah, he’s my little brother. Anyway, we went down to California, and before we got there, my sister’s twin sons were kidnapped.”

  Murphy again looked as though he wanted to say something. I didn’t let him. I wanted to get this part over with.

  “Ginger’s husband Fred was arrested for her murder, but of course he didn’t do it. He hired this lawyer, name of Chandler York.”

  “I heard about this,” Jones said. I was already thinking of him as Red. “I thought it was down in Maine?”

  “It ended there,” I said. “Or at least I hope it’s ended.” I tapped my ash into a coffee cup. I had to tread a fine line here between full and frank truth, and what wouldn’t get me arrested. “Chandler York was an alias of a man called Michael Vernon Smith. He was my husband’s foster father back in the day. He had a sort of… cult, of his former foster kids. They targeted my family because my husband had become very wealthy, and so had my brother-in-law. They play sick, psycho games with people. They torture people, and if you’re on their radar, you’ll sell your soul to get them to go away.” Murphy was scribbling away, not looking at me. “They killed my sister, they kidnapped my nephews, and when Jack – that’s my husband – when Jack and I tried to get the boys back, Jack got killed.” I took a deep drag, and felt a little sick. “They tried to kill me. One of them shot Darren in the chest with a bow and arrow. He nearly lost a lung. They kidnapped me and tried to get me to give them all of Jack’s money, and I killed a couple of them. In self-defence,” I added quickly. “It was investigated and everything. You can check.”

  “But I thought one of them is still at large,” Red said.

  “He is,” I said. “Chandler York. Or Michael Vernon Smith. He got away that night and he hasn’t been seen since. He’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.” I dumped the cigarette into cold coffee and swished it around. “Look. He told me that he has people everywhere, and he holds grudges, to put it mildly. I think it’s highly unlikely that today’s…”

  “Events,” Murphy finished for me.

  “Events. Yes. I doubt this has anything to do with me, but I thought you’d better be apprised of all the facts.” I grabbed a piece of scrap paper from Mary’s desk and wrote a phone number, passed it to Murphy. “This is my lawyer, Linda Patel in Toronto. She’ll answer any other questions you might have. Or you could talk to Paul Belliveau, he’s a staff sergeant with the Toronto Police. I forget which division. They can give you more information, should you need it.”

  It had taken five minutes to give my bare bones account of the events of last fall. I felt like I should get a gold star. I’d finally managed to Share.

  Detective Murphy had stopped writing at some point, I noticed, and just stared at me. “I agree, it’s probably unlikely it has anything to do with you,” he said, stressing the probably. He looked at Red. “Did you get all that?”

  “Probably not,” the young man answered. “Wow.”

  Murphy glared at him and turned back to me. “We don’t have the manpower to have a protective detail on you personally, Miss – Danny. Though I would like to. But we are going to see about bringing in extra men, or extra people I should say,” he stumbled, looking at me. I wanted to pat his hand and tell him it was okay. “The Major Crime Unit may be coming in. But rest assured, we’re going to be watching the centre here, that’s for sure.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Detective Murphy,” I said. “I can take care of myself.” I found myself scanning the office, looking for what I would use as a weapon if someone attacked me in this room.

  I felt a slow sense of dread and sadness take me over. Would it ever be over? Would I always have to look over my shoulder, wondering if someone would be coming after me or the people I loved? For a brief time I had been normal – well, normal for rehab – and didn’t feel the need to look for weapons or think about being on my guard. Physically, at least. Now, I found myself wondering how and whether I could get a firearm out here – next to impossible, I didn’t know anyone – and worrying about whether my presence here was putting other people in danger. People who couldn’t defend themselves. It was highly unlikely that the hand had anything to do with me, but then again, how often does that level of violent crime happen in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia?

  Murphy handed me his card and wrote his phone number on the back. “This is my direct line, and my cell phone,” he said. “Eyes and ears open, right?�
��

  “Right,” I said. As the two talked quietly together and mentioned something to me about coming into the station for a videotaped statement, I stared out at the mailbox. Something was bothering me, other than the obvious.

  “Detective Murphy,” I said. He turned at the door.

  “Call me Des,” he said. He smiled.

  “Des then.” I didn’t smile back. “Shouldn’t there have been a note? With the hand? I mean, wouldn’t that make sense? I mean, wouldn’t this guy want some kind of attention or acknowledgment? How will you find out whose hand it is?”

  Red coughed.

  “Yes, there was no note,” Murphy said. “But we’ll be checking for fingerprints.”

  “Two sets,” I said.

  “I’m sorry?” Murphy said. He was halfway out the door.

  “Two sets of fingerprints,” I said. “The doer and the hand itself. Two sets. You have to find out whose hand it is.”

  The younger cop looked pale under his freckles.

  “We’ll find out, Danny,” Murphy said. “You just concentrate on your recovery.”

  “Recovery,” I said, and took an e-cigarette from Evan’s desk. Might as well try to save my lungs. “Tell it to the hand.”

  Red laughed, and I gave him a smile. Better than crying.

  THREE

  Every year at the end of May, the Annapolis Valley hosts the Apple Blossom Festival. There’s a parade, and each little town and village has princesses and one of them is crowned Queen Annapolisa.

  “If this was a Shirley Jackson story, at the end of the weekend the locals would sacrifice the Queen to ensure the next year’s apple harvest,” Laurence said, reading a brochure he’d picked up at the airport. I reached over and patted his knee.