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Rehab Run

Page 29

by Barbra Leslie


  I stood with my hand on the phone, and realized I had no one to call. I didn’t remember Laurence’s number, and I could go and look up Debbie’s RCMP detachment, but what was I going to tell her? “Get back here immediately, Rose and Des Murphy had a baby”?

  In that moment, I didn’t have a single phone number in my memory bank. Even Darren’s was gone, not that I was going to call him.

  Dave. I had Dave’s number, as permanent as it could be, tattooed into the design on my inner left thigh. And I didn’t even have to look: as soon as I remembered it was there, I remembered what it was.

  Instead of getting Dave on the phone, a woman with a prim English accent answered, “Pemberly’s.” At least, that’s what I thought she said. I was so shocked that it was a woman’s voice that I was startled.

  “Oh,” I said. “I’m looking for Doug Douglas, please.” Our code name, since our time in California.

  “He’ll call you back very soon, Miss Cleary,” the woman said. She hadn’t paused to do a search of which weird made-up-on-the-spot alias he had used with each person who might call him. “I’m to tell you that he’s helping the police with their investigation, but all is well, and he’ll check in the minute he’s free.”

  “Free? Do you mean they’re holding him?” Who the fuck was this guy?

  “Not unless something has changed in the last thirty-five minutes, no,” the woman said. “He’s just doing the second part of his videotaped statement.” Well, she was certainly forthcoming, if she was telling the truth.

  “Listen, please,” I said. “I don’t have a phone at the moment. I mean, I’m on a landline; I’m staying at a friend’s cottage. I was released from the hospital today.”

  “Yes, we’re aware,” she said.

  I paused. “Who are you people, anyway?”

  “Dave will explain, Miss Cleary.”

  “What’s his last name?”

  “Miss Cleary, I’m going to have to direct you to speak to Dave again.”

  I sighed. “You do realize how bizarre this is, right?”

  “I do,” she said.

  “What did you say when you answered? Pemberly’s?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Miss Cleary. We’ll answer differently next time.”

  “What’s your name?” I said to the woman.

  “Astrid,” she said. There was the briefest of pauses between us, and then she said, “It really is.”

  Finally. I believed her. She was human.

  “Astrid, listen to me. I am at Constable Debbie MacLean’s cottage, her family cottage, on Ferryman Lake. I can’t even give you the phone number here because I don’t have it. I don’t have my phone, and the number isn’t written here.”

  “Are you alone?” she wanted to know.

  “I really hope so,” I said. “You’re, uh, apprised of what’s been happening?”

  “Yes,” she said crisply.

  “Constable MacLean is on shift, and my brother is quite late getting back. I’m not particularly mobile at the moment, as you obviously know. Several hours ago, I thought perhaps I saw someone at the edge of the woods, but I could have been mistaken. Debbie – Constable MacLean – mentioned something about thinking it too, that someone was still out there.” Fuck, I sounded like one hysterical chick. “I don’t have a weapon. Astrid, look. Do you believe in intuition? Instinct? A sort of, ha, almost psychic, sixth-sense kind of thing?”

  “Not usually,” she said, “but I believe in yours.” She was so brisk, so matter-of-fact and unwavering in her responses, I knew exactly why she worked with Dave. Or, more to the point, why Dave would want her working with him.

  “I feel as though something is wrong. I feel as though we’ve all missed something.”

  “You feel as though you may be in danger?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t hesitate.

  “I’m sending someone else to you,” she said. “Someone else you know.”

  “From the… team?”

  “Yes, but we don’t mention names, except mine and Dave’s,” she said. “In the meantime, you know what to do.”

  “Uh-huh.” I did.

  “When help is arriving, they will sound their horn, long and loud, from the road, so you know they’re coming and you know it’s them.”

  Loud noise. Announce it’s them, and also possibly scare any bad guys away.

  Or draw attention from me to them.

  “Thank you, Astrid,” I said.

  “I’ll be speaking with you again,” she said. “Good luck, Miss Cleary.”

  “Call me Danny,” I said. I didn’t want to hang up.

  “Good luck, Danny. Call back at any time.” She hung up.

  I hung up, and flicked the kitchen light off. The entire cottage was in darkness now. I had memorized the placement of a few things while I was speaking with Astrid. I hopped to the knife drawer and felt around, gingerly. I found a knife with a large handle and slid it into my back pocket, thankful I had changed into a pair of Debbie’s jean shorts. Right now, pockets were my friends.

  A baby born in 1992 would be in his or her mid-twenties by now.

  I thought I heard something, and realized it was just the wind.

  I felt for the stove, making as little sound as I could. I took the handle of the cast-iron frying pan that I’d seen there. I weighed it in my hand, getting used to its heft. It would do. I put it down quietly for a minute, as I took four ibuprofen from the bottle I’d taken from the bathroom. Laurence wasn’t back with my pills. I dry swallowed them, two at a time, keeping my ears open and my eyes trained on the outside.

  It was now full dark outside, and having the lights off inside not only made me less visible to anyone outside, but it helped with my night vision. If I had to go from a bright kitchen into a dark room or outside quickly, I’d be blind.

  I found a bar of hard soap by the sink, and I broke off a little chunk, smearing it into the skin on my face and neck, hoping it would be greasy and slippery. It was the best I could do with no Vaseline at hand. Fighter’s trick: having a greasy face helps punches slip and slide off you if they don’t land perfectly, and it can help with bruising.

  I was busy putting a few other things in my pockets when I saw the light flashing. A little flashing red light, somewhere by the phone. It was like the flashing light on a smoke detector when it’s losing its batteries.

  I held my breath and listened. No one could have come downstairs without me hearing; I remembered that the stairs were pretty creaky.

  I slid my body weight along the counter to avoid putting much weight on my bad leg, but I couldn’t move soundlessly at the moment. It wasn’t going to happen.

  I was back at the phone. The flashing light was coming from what I had assumed was a small stick-on light source over the phone. I had those in my apartment in Toronto as nightlights. But it wasn’t a light.

  It was a camera.

  Someone, somewhere, was watching. After a moment of feeling around under the phone and the counter, I found what I was looking for. Jonas had shown me examples of these on my tour of the safe house.

  A bug. And not the creepy-crawly kind.

  My heart was beating double-time. I headed for the back door, opened it, and threw one of my crutches outside. I let the door bang shut, and stood inside by the wall, and waited to see if someone outside would come running at the noise. My mind was racing.

  Someone was recording what went on here. I knew that these devices could have been placed there by Geoffrey when he was doing his errands for Mother Pamela. Maybe they didn’t trust Debbie, or Pamela just wanted to keep an eye on all the cottages around Dickie’s. Or someone else was recording us, someone who was still watching from the woods.

  I tried to slow my breathing. I didn’t have all the facts. I knew it couldn’t be Debbie; she was inside with Laurence and me when I saw the figure in the woods earlier in the day.

  Something had been eating away at the back of my mind for days. I just needed to get to it. I had filed something aw
ay. I had either heard or seen something that my brain had stored as a red flag, but I couldn’t remember what. Whether it was the meds or lack of them, my mind was blank of anything but the desire to flee. Inside the cottage, I felt like a sitting duck, being watched and heard, and I couldn’t bear it. I had to get out of the cottage, and get into the woods and hide until Dave’s people arrived.

  I might be heading into the woods where someone had been watching me. But despite my injury, despite everything, action was a lot more natural to me than sitting around waiting.

  I opened the door and went outside.

  THIRTY-NINE

  I threw the cast-iron pan a few feet down onto the ground so I could negotiate the stairs from the back door with one crutch. I was putting weight on my leg now. I had to. And I was relying on adrenaline to help me with pain.

  There was no point in trying to be quiet now. I just had to move. I had to assume there was a camera showing angles from the back door, if there had been one in the kitchen.

  When I was off the steps, I picked up the pan and chucked a crutch as far as I could into the trees. I made my way toward where I’d thrown it, moving more quickly than I had since the night Dave and I had run through these woods. A bolt of pain shot up from my leg and made everything on my right side hurt. Even the roots of my teeth hurt.

  I grunted, but I didn’t stop.

  I passed the outbuilding, Debbie’s garage/woodworking studio. There was a padlock on the door. I could see that well enough from here. I headed to it.

  The padlock was rusty and barely functional. Two decent whacks with the cast-iron pan broke one of the sides of the shackle in half.

  I leaned against the door and listened. I thought I heard a car in the distance, but I couldn’t be sure. It could be Dave’s crew, or Debbie, or some random stranger. Or even the wind, which was picking up. I hesitated for a second. I didn’t particularly want to be in the woods if a storm started. And I really didn’t want my leg to open up and get infected, again.

  I went inside the building, and shut the door behind me.

  What I wouldn’t have given for a headlamp or a flashlight. I wasn’t going to risk turning on the lights. There was a large window at the far end, the lake end, and two smaller ones, high up, on either side. At the far end, from the little I could see in the dark, there might have been a few tools and some wood.

  But what really had my attention was right in front of me.

  A vehicle covered by a tarp. A pickup-sized vehicle. I lifted the tarp. It was a truck. It was black, or maybe midnight blue; too hard to tell in the dark. But I would have bet cash money that, until not long ago, that truck had been canary yellow. I didn’t even bother to check if the windows were tinted. I might not be able to tell in here, and besides, I knew.

  “I knew you’d find it,” a voice said from the dark. “I just thought you’d wait a day or two before you made it out here to snoop around, so I could get a chance to have a talk with you.”

  Debbie was standing in the open doorway. I hadn’t heard her over the crinkling of the tarp, the wind, and the beating of my heart.

  And in that moment, I remembered what my mind had stored for me.

  When Laurence and I had come to stay here the first time, when I was searching the cottage like a crazy woman and one of us had to go into the basement to turn on the water, Debbie had phoned and walked us through it. And at some point recently, she had made a comment about how it wasn’t necessary to go into the basement with an axe. She had made a joke about it, telling me that her place was safe.

  But I had never told her about how scared Laurence and I were that first night here, and how she had phoned – at exactly the right moment – to tell us how to turn the water on, and that I was going to go down into her unknown basement with the axe that was hanging on the wall behind the door. Unless she had seen it as well as heard it, she wouldn’t know that. I hadn’t told her. I was sure I hadn’t told her.

  Debbie talked about both her parents being big – the later picture I had seen of Rose indicated she was a heavier woman, and Des certainly was. She was about the right age to have been born when Rose was seventeen or eighteen.

  Debbie was the daughter of Desmond Murphy and Rose Carlisle. The daughter they had given up for adoption. Pamela’s granddaughter, and Geoffrey’s niece.

  I looked at her. She was in uniform. She had a gun at one hip and a tactical baton at the other. She was a few years younger and as tall as I was, and trained.

  I had a badly injured leg, a crutch, and a cast-iron pan, which was on the ground somewhere here.

  Hoo boy, I don’t fancy her chances, Ginger’s voice said in my head, and I laughed.

  “I love your laugh. I really like you,” she said. “I was hoping we were going to have some time in the next days, so I could talk to you. I don’t think I did anything you wouldn’t have done. That’s one of the reasons I talked to you that day at Rose’s. I knew what you did for your family, Danny. I knew you killed people for your family. What makes us any different?”

  She seemed sincere. She seemed like Debbie. And I didn’t want to have to try to fight her. And that’s if she would even fight, and not just shoot me.

  “At the moment, I’m really not sure,” I said. “But first of all – where’s Laurence? He said he was going to be back here in a couple of hours.”

  “He’s fine. He got hung up at Rose’s,” she said. “He found a bunch of teenagers in the basement, taking selfies and drinking. He called us, and they put him through to me. He tried to call here, but I told him I’d take a run out here and check on you. It’s a remarkably quiet night, other than that, and I’m covering for someone else. Easy to get a bit of time off.”

  “Oh,” I said. That could be true. She sounded like she was telling the truth. And, oddly, I didn’t think she would lie to me now. “I found the yearbook. I saw the picture of Rose pregnant. Was that with you, then?” I leaned against the truck, facing her. I was up by the cab, and Debbie was standing by the end of the truck, pacing a bit.

  “Yeah. Rose Carlisle and Des Murphy were my parents.”

  “Well, that’s where you get your height, then.”

  “Yup.” I could tell she was smiling.

  “So why MacLean?”

  “I was adopted. Rose’s father made her put me up for adoption. And my dad’s parents wouldn’t let him fight it. And then Rose’s father took her down to the States, and she was only a kid. Eighteen is only a kid, right? She had a chance to start a new life, and she took it.” She looked at the ground. She seemed like a child suddenly. She wanted to believe that neither of her parents had wanted to abandon her. “It was fate, though, that Des and I both ended up back here. I mean, after Depot…”

  “Depot?” I said.

  “RCMP training, in Regina,” she said. “Anyway, I was posted up north, and then it was just a fluke I got sent back here. We move around a lot, but we can ask for assignments. Doesn’t mean we get them.”

  “And you wanted to be home,” I said.

  “Wouldn’t you? It’s paradise here.”

  I decided to let that one pass. My plans for buying a summer home in the area had long since evaporated. Along with my desire for meat. Or lobster.

  “Anyway, Des had moved around a bit but he’s been with H Division – here in Nova Scotia, I mean – for a long time. But the fact that we wound up at the same detachment? And then I find out he’s my dad?” She shook her head like she couldn’t believe her luck.

  “When I met him and spent some time with him, he reminded me of my own dad.” I sounded like I was being honest, because I was.

  “You had both of your parents, Laurence told me. That must have been nice.”

  “It was,” I said. “I was really lucky.”

  “Until you weren’t,” she said. But she sounded gentle, sad. “You lost yours, and I found mine.”

  “And Pamela, your grandmother,” I said. She nodded. My eyes were adjusting to the dark. “And your unc
le, Geoffrey,” I said.

  “I really liked Geoffrey,” she said. “He was sort of a tortured soul, you know? He had some issues with mental illness when he was younger, and it made him very sensitive to other people. You know what I mean. He was the kind of soft-hearted lug who always took in strays.”

  I felt so odd. I felt like I was having a good, honest conversation with this woman. She didn’t seem crazy, and she didn’t seem like a killer. Like someone who could tie a defenceless young woman to a tree and let animals feed on her.

  “Did you grow up okay? I mean, were your adoptive parents good people?”

  “Oh, absolutely. I love them. They had a farm. They were an older couple. They had another adopted girl, a few years older than me. We had a few cows, horses, chickens.”

  “Where are they now?” I was really hoping she wasn’t going to say tied to trees somewhere, or in a hole in the ground in some random forest.

  “Boca Raton,” she said, and I laughed, and then so did she. “They’re fine, Danny. They don’t even know I was looking for my birth parents, or that Des found me.”

  I hoped for their sake that they stayed in Boca.

  “Actually, you know my sister,” she said. “My adopted sister. Janet? She worked at Rose’s.”

  “Janet is your sister?” Wispy Janet, who wouldn’t say boo to a goose? Who Laurence had given money to clear out of the area, after we had all been shot at in the dining room.

  Who had told us that she had been a bit afraid of her little sister.

  I wanted to ask Debbie everything. I wanted to know how much of a role she had played in the killings. And a part of me didn’t want to know.

  “Janet still lives on the farm, when she’s not living at Rose’s Place,” she said. “She was another one.”

  “Another what?”

  “Addict.” Debbie was pacing a bit, between the end of the truck and the wall. “Pamela didn’t mind her, though, and Des would never have hurt her. She didn’t do anything wrong. She got herself cleaned up and tried to help people.”

 

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