Rehab Run

by Barbra Leslie

  “We hope,” Dave said. “That was the idea, anyway.”

  I took the phone out of my pocket. I didn’t want to stop what we were doing. This was the first time I felt on top of things since it all started happening.

  I looked at my phone. “Huh,” I said, before reading the text aloud. “‘That wasn’t supposed to happen to you. Very sorry. Get well soon.’ No idea. Mary?”

  “What’s the number?” Jonas asked. I read it out to him, a 902 number. Local, in other words. Jonas did what he did, while we watched.

  “It’s a pay-as-you-go, bought at a mall out of town, registered to Richard Doyle,” Jonas said. “Today. It was bought today.”

  “Can we get the security footage of where it was bought?” Laurence said. He was flushed, leaning forward. I knew he was hoping it was actually Dickie, but after the missing tattoo and the severed finger delivery, I deemed it unlikely.

  “Working on it,” Jonas said. His fingers were flying across the keyboard.

  “Danny, didn’t anyone tell you to turn off your phone? Get rid of the SIM card?” Dave was looking very serious.

  I looked at Laurence, who shrugged.

  “Oh, wow, my bad,” Jonas said. “I really thought you would have told them. And I keep thinking they’re professionals. Or at least that she is,” he said, nodding at me.

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “Laurence, give me your phone.” He took it out of his pocket and handed it over. I was going to start taking both our iPhones apart to take the SIM out, but Jonas just gave me a look and held his hand out.

  “Why is this an issue?” Laurence said. “If we don’t recognize a number, we won’t answer the phone.”

  “If anyone in the RCMP is involved in this somehow, they could track your whereabouts using these,” Jonas said. He spoke with the patience of someone who is constantly surprised at how childlike most people are.

  “Which means,” I said, picking up the twenty I was using as a straw, “that your safe house is no longer as safe as we were hoping.” I snorted a line and rubbed some into my gums.

  “I think it’s time for a quick tour of the weapons,” Dave said. He rubbed his hands together, like he was eager to get started. He motioned for us all to get up and follow him.

  “Now we’re talking,” I said.

  Dave looked at me. “You’re not touching anything tonight. You can look, but hands off.”

  “That’s what he said,” Laurence and I said at exactly the same moment, and after a one-second pause at the perfection in our timing, we all cracked up. As I am often prone to a touch of hysteria when it is least appropriate, it was nice to see that I was not alone.

  Jonas then showed us the CCTV camera from the mall where the phone was bought.

  It was grainy, and it was black and white. A woman. A thin woman in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, with a baseball cap covering her hair. She spent less than five minutes at a kiosk in the mall making a purchase, and then she walked away, head down.

  “Mary,” Laurence said. We were all quiet.

  “Or anybody,” I said. “I have never seen Mary wear long sleeves.”

  “And you have never known Mary to try to avoid detection before, either,” Dave said, but gently. “And you’ve only known her a very short time.”

  No one said anything.

  At that moment, a very loud alarm started ringing throughout the house.

  “We’ve got guests,” Dave said. “Get down.” And he dove for the floor – or more precisely, the gun he had secured under the couch – just as someone banged at the back door.

  “They’d better not want any of my cake,” I said, but I seemed to be the only one who found it funny.

  Cocaine. It’s a hell of a drug.

  I heard the two people in the basement come running up the stairs, and Dave motioned for Laurence and I to sit where we were and not move. Laurence had crawled closer to me, as though I was going to let him block me from whatever might happen.

  Fat chance.

  Jonas, however, was calm. “Hey, hey! It’s just Ned. Everybody chill.” I scooched over to where he was sitting with his back against the couch. Sure enough, he was looking at video images of cameras that had been installed all around the perimeter of the house.

  “Jesus,” Dave said, and went to the back door. But I noticed he kept his gun in his hand, at his side, instead of tucking it into his pants or leaving it. I couldn’t see the back door from the living room, but I watched on the video with Jonas as Dave opened the door and a big guy came in. The two men hugged briefly, and I watched as the two from the basement exchanged what looked like friendly words with him. I couldn’t make out his face, but something about him was familiar.

  Everybody traipsed into the living room. Dave, followed by the older guy and younger woman who had been putting the film on the windows.

  And then Aussie Rules walked in, hands in his jeans pockets.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “Hey there,” he said, with no trace of an Australian accent. He walked over and shook Laurence’s hand. “We haven’t been formally introduced. Ned.” My brain was exploding slightly, but I played it cool.

  “Aussie Rules, right?” he said. He sounded pure Yankee. “Yeah, I heard you say that once.”

  “So much for my ear for accents,” I said. Even though it was clear that this guy was a plant of Dave’s and therefore not actually in need of rehab, I felt embarrassed about the coke in front of me. For a minute, anyway.

  “Ned likes to really go, like, undercover,” Jonas said. He held his hand up for Ned to slap, without moving from his spot. “Totally unnecessary, but whatever floats his boat.”

  “What can I say, I’m a frustrated actor,” Ned said. “Listen. I’m starving, and we’ve got to talk.”

  “Were you followed?” Dave said.

  “Bitch, please,” Ned said. “I wound up walking half the way up here.”

  While everybody else went into the kitchen to scavenge for food, I sat with Jonas. He actually looked away from his laptop for a minute and patted my knee. “How you doing, little sister?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Fan-fucking-tastic.”

  “A lot to take in, right?”

  “You can say that again.” I started cutting a couple more lines.

  “I don’t suppose I should ask you to take it a bit easy with that?”

  I started to say something snarky, but stopped myself. These people were all here to help me. I didn’t have any idea how all of this worked for them, but having a whole security team – or whatever they were – come to my aid was not something I wanted to take for granted. And Jonas was just being kind.

  “I will,” I said. “I just have a feeling this isn’t going to be an early night.”

  “You might want to have a glass of wine now, along with the water,” he said. “So you don’t get too jangly. Am I right?”

  “Actually, yes.” Before I could move, Jonas jumped up with the ease of a six-year-old and came back with an unopened bottle of white and two glasses.

  “I’m going to join you,” he said. “I don’t drink much, though, so if I get silly just slap me.” I grinned at him. Matthew and Luke were going to love him. I wondered if I’d ever be able to tear him away from Dave. Maybe he could be my sober companion and security guy, all in one! The thought made me ridiculously happy, under the circumstances.

  Ten minutes later, all of us were sitting around on the living room floor. The young woman was Lydia, and the older guy was her uncle Bert. They were both Brits. Laurence had brought the cake down and everybody sang “Happy Birthday” to me, and then Laurence handed out plates of cake.

  It was, by far, the strangest birthday party I’d ever had.

  Aussie Rules – Ned – was eating Jonas’s leftovers and studying me. More carefully than I felt comfortable with.

  “So, this is weird,” I said. “Did you know about this?” I said to my brother, indicating Ned.

  “Nope,” he said. “To be honest, it would have
been nice if we had been told. How did you know Danny was going to be there? And why did you feel the need to have her watched?” He was drinking wine again, and despite everything, he seemed to be mistrusting Dave again.

  “It’s complicated, but Danny knows that she and I have a mutual… enemy.”

  “Michael Vernon Smith. I’m aware, yes.”

  Dave looked at Laurence. “So I feel responsible for the fact that I wasn’t able to stop what happened to Jack MacRae in Toronto. And to Darren in Maine. I have my own reasons for keeping an eye on Smith, and keeping an eye on him means keeping an eye on Danny.” He looked at the floor, and I realized like lightning that he had other reasons for keeping tabs on me. I buried my face as far as I could into my wine glass, as though I was appreciating its bouquet. Or whatever wine snobs call it.

  “Because you think Smith is keeping tabs on her?”

  Dave nodded. “He doesn’t give up. It may be years before we hear from him again, but I have no doubt that we will.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “But let’s get back to matters at hand.” I looked at Ned. “What happened?”

  “So, as these characters know,” he said, indicating everyone in the room except for me and Laurence, “I’ve been the last resident left.”

  “How did they let you stay?”

  “Well, it got complicated for them. I made a bit of a stink, because, you know, I’m a paid-up resident, and the owner is missing. I said I had changed my mind about going back to Oz,” he said, slipping into his Aussie Rules accent, “and with all of them there, I felt safe.”

  “Did you?” Laurence said. “Feel safe.”

  “Pfft,” he said, and grinned. “Safe is boring.”

  “These dudes are all adrenaline junkies,” Jonas explained to me. I nodded. I knew the type. I was the type. At least, I used to be.

  “I found out a couple of things,” Ned continued. “One, Evan wasn’t such a lily-white young man. He was dealing weed and pills. Perfect place to do it, really.”

  “Wow,” I said. “He never approached me.”

  “No,” Ned said. “Well, he knew what your drug of choice was, and let us just say, your reputation preceded you. He wasn’t going to try anything with you.” He pushed his empty plate aside and started on his cake as though he hadn’t eaten in a year. “But it was penny ante stuff, at any rate. Like I said, weed and pills.”

  “Opiates aren’t penny ante,” I said. “That’s how Rose Doyle started down her road. People can get hooked on that shit, then they to go fentanyl, or heroin… it’s awful stuff.” There was a small silence as people looked at me, with cocaine laid out in front of me in neat lines. “You guys know what I mean.”

  Laurence spoke up. “Wait a minute,” he said. “So Evan was dealing, and we know that Sarah had gone into the basement to smoke weed the night she left. The night she was abducted.”

  “So the killer hates drug users?” I said. “The whole place was full of drug users. Kind of the point.”

  Dave shook his head. “No, Laurence is right. It’s one thing to be there and getting your shit together. It’s another thing to be, what, throwing that chance away by using or selling. If that’s a motive, I mean.”

  “Holy shit,” I said. I snorted a line and dabbed water into my nose. Amazing, to be doing that in front of everybody. And so far, I actually hadn’t craved crack. But I knew I couldn’t keep this up. Dave and Laurence were right – this felt too good, and if I kept going, I would be right back where I started. “Des said the cops were going to go through files with Mary, old patient records, to see if there were any, I don’t know, disgruntled or particularly… weird former residents.” I was talking too fast. I needed to slow down. “And the day I went to see Mary. I told you she got really upset when I was talking about all the harm I had caused, being an addict. How my sister’s death, and my husband’s death, could both be attributed to my stupidity. She tried to get me to stop talking like that, and she got up and started making noise. Maybe she was trying to stop someone from overhearing me.”

  “If that’s true, Mary is innocent,” Laurence said. “She was trying to save Danny.” We all sat with that for a minute. Jonas was on his laptop again.

  “I don’t think you could say she’s innocent,” Ned said slowly. “I didn’t get to know her like you did, and I agree she – well, I would never have put her down as a killer, that’s for sure. But the truth of the matter is, she’s missing.” He finished his cake. “But here’s the piece I really wanted to get to. I’ve been keeping my ears open and hanging out with some of the Mounties who are on the grounds.” He cleared his throat. “Mary kept her own name when she married Geoffrey.”

  “Mary Dowe, yeah,” I said. “So?”

  “So,” Jonas said, looking at his computer screen, “Geoffrey’s last name is Carlisle.”

  “He’s Rose’s brother,” Ned said. He looked slightly put out that Jonas had stolen his thunder.

  “You didn’t know this?” I said to Laurence.

  “Obviously not,” he said. He looked pale. “And I don’t think Dickie did either. Geoffrey wasn’t at the wedding – it was a small wedding, I remember who was there. And Dickie would have mentioned it. I know he would have mentioned it.”

  “Laurence, you may have to face that you possibly didn’t know Dickie Doyle as well as you thought you did,” Dave said. “What are the chances that Dickie hired Mary to run Rose’s Place just out of the blue, without a family connection of some kind?”

  “Maybe not,” Jonas said. “Geoffrey Carlisle spent a number of years in a psychiatric hospital when he was in his twenties and into his thirties, but I don’t know why. Yet. And he’s that much older than Rose – he was born in sixty-seven, Rose in seventy-five. So when she was in her late teens, he was hospitalized.”

  “So, what are you saying? That Rose kept her crazy brother a secret from her husband?” I said.

  “Not every family is like the Clearys, Danny,” Dave said. “People have secrets. She was, what, Queen Bee…”

  “Queen Annapolisa,” I said.

  “Right. And then when her father moved to the States, Rose went down there too and went to Bennington and married a smart man from a good family. She might not have wanted to advertise the skeleton in her closet.” He shrugged. “Devil’s advocate. We have to look at all possibilities.”

  I hoped that wasn’t it. I hoped Rose wasn’t that petty. I couldn’t imagine abandoning my family. Then again, when I was holed up in my apartment doing crack, that’s exactly what I had, effectively, done.

  “Either Dickie knew about Geoffrey being Rose’s brother or he didn’t,” Dave continued. “But where does that leave us? Geoffrey and Mary are still missing, yes?” He looked at Ned, who nodded. “Sergeant Murphy and Dickie Doyle are, as well.”

  “So who are the bad guys and who are the good guys?” Lydia piped up. I noticed she had pulled a gun out of somewhere and was cleaning it slowly and carefully. I probably would have smelled the oil, but my nose had been otherwise occupied.

  “Well, I think it’s safe to say that whoever bashed me on the head and left me tied to a pier to drown in high tide isn’t a good guy,” I said. “And I was knocked out at Geoffrey’s house.”

  “Still, we make no assumptions. Not yet,” Dave said. “First things first: We need to find out if there are hidden bunkers anywhere around Rose’s place.”

  “Or Dickie’s cabin,” I said.

  “Or Geoffrey and Mary’s house,” Laurence added. “But how, exactly, do we do that? Show up there with shovels and start digging?”

  “Every question has a creative solution, brother,” Jonas said. “You’ve entered my territory now.” He and Dave started talking about ground-penetrating radar, people they knew who could be up here by morning, and I started to drift. Jonas was simultaneously hacking the local planning office. Ned and Bert went to the kitchen and brought back a few cold beers for the non-wine drinkers, and Lydia started cleaning another gun.


  I just wanted to get moving. The police, according to Ned, had finished the search at Geoffrey and Mary’s house, and it was sealed. The media had spent a day camped out front during the search, but had moved on, still hanging out down by Rose’s. And by some miracle, they hadn’t found Dickie’s cabin. It had been registered under a numbered company, and so far neither police nor locals had spilled the beans.

  And, sadly, a university shooting in Tucson with a high body count had taken some of the attention off what was happening in this sleepy backwater.

  I knew that what Jonas and Dave and the rest of the crew did was important. And sitting around like this exchanging information had been invaluable. But it was dark, it was late, and wasn’t this the best time to get off our asses and do some actual looking? Some leg-work?

  I looked at Laurence, who seemed ready to pass out. He was never much of a drinker, and he probably hadn’t had much sleep while I was in hospital.

  “Listen,” I said. “I think Laurence needs to crash, and Ned, you probably do too, after that walk. I’m obviously going to be up for a while—” I gestured to the cocaine “—but I think a lot of what we have to do now is down to Jonas, before we decide on how to act.”

  I glanced at Dave, hoping he could read that I didn’t mean a word of what I had just said. I just wanted to get Laurence away and safely tucked in. And to prove it, I neatly scraped the remaining coke back into the baggie Dave had given me, leaving myself one small line on the table. And maybe a few crumbs here and there.

  “I’m a civilian,” Laurence said. He ran his hand over his face, his sandy blond hair. I felt such a surge of love for him. “I can’t pretend to be as superhuman as the rest of you.” He started to get to his feet. “These old bones are creaking.”

  “You’re, what, forty-three? Forty-four? You’re hardly a pensioner, my brother.”

  “I’m a desk jockey, Danny, as you well know.” On his way past, he picked up the little baggie I was going to give back to Dave, and made the delivery himself. I got up and followed him, to use the bathroom and check that he was okay.

  “You feel safe?” I said, standing in the doorway of his room.