Dead and Gone

by Norah McClintock

  “I want to stay at home with you,” I said. Just like that, without even thinking about it. He caught the word at the same time I did—home—and nodded.

  “Meet me here after school then,” he said. “I think it would be better if we drove for the next little while.”

  I nodded but didn’t move.

  “Go on into school,” Riel said.

  “What about you?”

  “They’re not going to leave until they get what they want.” He drew in a deep breath and then blew it out again. “I don’t want them disrupting things here. I’m going to go out and talk to them.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “It’s okay, Mike. It’s not like I haven’t done this before.”

  “Is it true?” Sal said. He came up and stood beside me at the windows along the catwalk that overlooked the school atrium inside and the street outside. Riel was out there, crushed in the middle of a bunch of reporters. There were uniformed cops on either side of him, looking out for him, I guess. I wondered if Detective Jones had anything to do with them being there.

  I turned to look at Sal. His eyes shifted to the floor for a moment, then back up at me again. “I like him,” he said. “He treats my father like he’s normal. He one of the only people who does that.”

  “He likes your father,” I said. Riel went to visit Sal’s dad every couple of weeks. He always took along a book or a magazine in Spanish for Mr. San Miguel, and then he sat and talked to him, also in Spanish.

  Sal said, “All I meant was, is he okay? Is anything bad going to happen?”

  “Yeah, he’s okay,” I said, even though I wasn’t entirely sure that was actually true. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. It was investigated after it happened.” I meant the whole thing about the girl who was shot. Emily’s sister—the one she hadn’t wanted to talk about. No wonder. “It was ruled an accident. I don’t think anything else is going to happen about that.”

  Sal gave me a look. He hadn’t meant that at all. His dad had been in prison back in Guatemala, where Sal’s from. He was tortured while he was there and had never really recovered. So what Sal meant was, was Riel going to be okay with his past being made public, was he going to be okay coming into school and standing in front of four or five classes of kids every day, five days a week, and then going into the staff lounge and being with all the teachers, and everyone knowing things about him that maybe they hadn’t known before.

  I wished I knew. But I didn’t.

  That day a lot of other people asked me the same thing that Sal had asked: Is it true? I just looked at them. I didn’t answer.

  I met Riel downstairs after school. I wanted to ask him if he was okay, but I could see that he wasn’t. He looked tense and tired.

  We got home okay—nobody bothered us—and I did my homework. Riel made supper, same as always, and then I headed to the community center. I was almost at the main doors when a woman appeared out of nowhere and asked me if I was Michael McGill. I nodded. She asked me if I lived with John Riel. Who was she? How did she know my name? How did she know about Riel? Then she said, “The same John Riel who was a police detective with traffic services and who investigated your mother’s death?” At the same time that she was asking me that, a guy appeared behind her and pointed a light and a camera at me, practically blinding me. I remembered what Riel had said—if they ask you any questions, don’t say anything.

  “Detective Riel botched that investigation too, didn’t he?” the woman said.

  I tried to back away from her, but she kept shoving her microphone in my face and the guy with the camera kept his light steady on me. Then someone grabbed my arm. I started to jerk free but saw that it was Teresa Rego.

  “Come on, Mike,” she said. She pulled me toward the door. The woman with the camera was still moving forward, still trying to get me to say something. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” Teresa asked her. “He’s just a kid.” She got me inside the community center and then into her office. She locked the door. “Well,” she said, sinking down on the chair behind her desk, “now I’ve got to figure out how to get you out of here again.”

  “Maybe they’ll just go away,” I said.

  “Those people never go away.” She sounded like maybe she had some experience with the press. Bad experience. She looked at me. “Is John at home?”

  “I think so.”

  She called Riel and told him what was going on. She listened for a minute, and then she passed the phone to me.

  “Sit tight,” Riel said. “I’ll get someone to pick you up.”

  I thought maybe it would be Detective Jones, but no, it was Susan. First I saw her car slide up the driveway that ran alongside the community center and led to the parking lot in the back. Then the phone rang in Teresa’s office. Teresa answered. When she hung up, she said, “I’m going to go out front to talk to them, tell them to get lost. When you see me go through that door, you go down the hall and out the back, okay? Susan Thomas is waiting there for you.”

  It sounded too easy, but it worked. When Teresa went outside, the woman with the microphone and the guy with the camera and a few other people who I hadn’t noticed before—reporters, I guess—pressed in around her. I ducked down the hall. Mr. Henderson was there, checking the locks on doors.

  “You’re late,” he said.

  I looked at him, but I didn’t stop. I pushed my way outside and there was Susan, in her car, just outside the back door.

  “Get down,” she said after I climbed into the front seat.

  It seemed so stupid, having to hide like that, as if I’d done something wrong—which I hadn’t. But then, I realized, neither had Riel. I ducked down like Susan said and didn’t pop up again until she gave me the all clear. I got ready to duck down again when we got to Riel’s street—just in case—but she drove right by it.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “We’re going to my place,” she said. “John doesn’t want anyone to bother you.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  She looked at me and sort of shrugged. “It’s what he wants, Mike.” Like that was it, there was no point in discussing it or arguing about it.

  Susan lived in a condo down by the water. One entire wall of the place was glass, and through it you could look out over the harbor across to the Island and, beyond that, clear across the lake. It was a big place, too, for one person—a huge living room, a pretty big dining room, a kitchen with an alcove to eat in and a walk-out to a balcony overlooking the water, a den where she kept her TV and her VCR, two big bedrooms, a couple of bathrooms, a laundry room. It was comfortable, too. The place was nicely decorated and furnished and made you feel, once you got inside, that you could really settle there.

  When we got inside, she dropped her purse on a table beside the front door and then picked up the phone. She must have called Riel, because I heard her say, “He’s fine,” and “No, no one followed us.” And that was it. He didn’t ask to talk to me.

  “You hungry?” Susan said.

  I said I wasn’t.

  “You want something to drink?”

  I shook my head. She went to the fridge, pulled out a bottle of white wine, and poured herself a glass. She carried it to the couch in the living room and sat down.

  “They didn’t bother you too much, did they, Mike?”

  I told her what the woman reporter had said. She shook her head.

  “You wonder how someone like that would feel under the same circumstances,” she said. “Personally, I don’t think they think about it. When John was in the hospital that time, a couple of them practically camped out outside his door, waiting until they could pester him with their questions.”

  “Is that how you met him?” I said.

  The question seemed to surprise her, but she nodded. “When you work in ER, you meet all kinds of people.” She took a sip of her wine. “Did he tell you about what happened?”

  I said he had.

  “While he was in the hospital, I went up t
o see him a couple of times. He didn’t talk much, though. He was kind of withdrawn, you know? Then he was discharged to a rehab place. And that was that, I didn’t expect to ever see him again. Then one day I was down at U of T.” The University of Toronto, she meant. “I’d been asked to talk to some medical students about emergency medicine. I was walking across campus, back to where I’d parked my car, and there he was, carrying a pile of books. A student. We talked and, well—” She shrugged, only this time she smiled. Then she said, “You want to watch a movie?”

  I should have said no. Susan is a nice person, and according to Riel she’s a terrific doctor. But she’s a woman. A woman who likes ballet. And the kind of novels that have the Oprah Book Club seal on the front. There were a few of them on a table near the TV. It turned out she also liked sad movies about messed-up families where in the end they all say they love each other and everything turns out just fine. I tried to picture Riel watching one of those movies and drew a blank. But then, I had trouble picturing him sitting beside her at the ballet, even though I knew he had gone with her.

  The movie was pretty boring. Susan must have thought so too. Either that or she’d had a hard day, because about halfway through I heard a sound, like the world’s smallest buzz saw, and I looked over and saw her head tipped against the back of the couch. Her mouth was open. She was sound asleep, and she was snoring. Great. I didn’t want to switch off the movie in case she woke up and got offended. But I didn’t want to have to sit there watching it, either, when it had already put her to sleep.

  There were some magazines in neat piles on the shelf under her coffee table. I leaned over and grabbed a handful and flipped through them. Medical journals, gourmet cooking magazines, and women’s magazines. Well, what had I expected?

  I waited for the movie to end. When she still didn’t wake up, I picked up the remote and surfed until I found the hockey game. I watched that until the Leafs lost, then I found an action movie, which I watched by turning down the volume every time the actors turned up the firepower. Susan woke up about halfway through. She blinked at me. Her cheeks turned pink.

  “I’m so sorry, Mike,” she said. “That was rude of me.”

  I said it was no problem. I said if she was tired, she shouldn’t let me keep her up. She told me where her guest room was and said that she had put out some fresh towels for me. I must have looked surprised, because then she said that Riel was going to try to come by, but he didn’t want any reporters to show up at her place so he wasn’t sure when he was going to make it. She said if anyone buzzed and she was asleep, I should check who it was before letting them into the building.

  “You sure I can’t get you anything?” she said.

  I told her I was fine.

  I settled down on the couch again and watched the end of the movie. When the news came on, I switched to another channel and watched a rerun of a cop show. I was thinking that maybe I should get to bed when the buzzer sounded.

  I waited a moment to see if Susan was going to come out, but she didn’t. So I went to the speaker beside her door and pressed the button there and asked who it was.

  “Mike? That you?” Riel said. “Buzz me through.”

  Two minutes later he knocked on the door and I let him in.

  “What took you so long to get here?” I said.

  He didn’t answer my question. Instead he looked around and said, “Where’s Susan?”

  “She went to bed a while ago,” I said.

  He seemed sort of disappointed, but he said, “Sounds like a good idea. Get your stuff. Let’s go.”

  On the way home he told me that Emily had called and wanted me to call her back. “She said it’s about a wallet.” He glanced at me. “Did you lose your wallet, Mike?”

  “No!” But, of course, that’s what he would think: irresponsible Mike. “You want to see it?”

  He shook his head.

  “Does Rebecca know about her?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Then, “It’s not the same thing with Emily as it is with Rebecca.”

  “Oh.”

  I thought about telling Riel who she was, that she was Emily Corwin, but I didn’t. I didn’t see how it would help matters, but, boy, I sure saw how it might hurt him. It would just remind him of everything all over again, and I didn’t want to do that. Besides, there was the whole thing with her stupid wallet. I had tossed the baggie and the wallet into a drawer. I hadn’t even looked at it. Maybe I should have, though, because now I started to think that maybe the wallet wasn’t the one with my fingerprints on it. Maybe it was similar, but not the same. That would be just like Emily. Except, jeez, she’d just had this news about her mother. You wouldn’t think she would care about a stupid wallet. Well, maybe you would—if you knew her the way I did.

  When we got home and into the house, I saw that Riel had a lot of papers spread out all over the dining room table. At first I thought they were papers he was grading. But then I saw photographs. I reached for one of them. He intercepted me.

  “Bed,” he said. “Now.”

  I watched him gather everything up and shove it all into a folder. Then he said, “I mean it, Mike.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was quiet in the house when I woke up. Quiet and lighter than normal. I looked at the clock on my bedside table. Jeez—ten thirty! I had missed first period, homeroom, and the start of second period. Riel was gonna …

  Riel.

  How come Riel hadn’t woken me up? The only thing I could think of: he was gone.

  But he wasn’t.

  I raced downstairs and found him at the dining room table with all that stuff spread out again, the papers and the photographs. Also on the table, a bunch of empty beer bottles. Not a good sign. He didn’t even look up when I came into the room.

  “Is it a professional development day,” I said, “and nobody told me?”

  His head swung up, and he looked at me with bleary eyes. I wondered if he’d been to bed at all.

  “It’s ten thirty,” I said, and checked my watch. Correction. “Ten forty-five.”

  “I’m taking the day off.”

  Another not-good sign. Riel could riff for an hour on the subject of duty and responsibility—how 90 percent of life was showing up, how when people depended on you, you should never let them down, how if you said you were going to do something, you should do it, no ifs, ands, or buts. He could do another hour on the subject of punctuality—how people who were late for things were being disrespectful, how other people’s time is valuable too, so you shouldn’t leave them waiting around and wondering where you were, how tardiness betrays lack of maturity, lack of organization, and lack of character.

  But on a school day when he was supposed to be standing in front of a classroom, teaching, here he was, sitting in his dining room, staring through beer-soaked eyes at a table strewn with old information. He had no idea what time it was. He didn’t even seem to be aware of the concept of time.

  “Did you call them?”

  “Huh?”

  Boy, it was weird—me doing the parent thing, him looking blankly at me.

  “Did you call the school?” I said.

  He nodded. “I left a message.” He peered down at his watch. “I left a message around seven. They’ll get someone.”

  His cell phone rang. He stared down at it, like he was thinking over whether or not to answer it. Finally he picked it up and said hello. Then he said yeah, he was here. He said, fine. He put the phone down and said, “Get the door, will you, Mike?”

  Huh?

  The doorbell rang.

  Detective Jones was standing on the porch. His expression was serious. He said hi without really looking at me. He wiped his boots on the mat when he came into the house, but he didn’t take them off like he should have.

  “I’m surprised to find you home on a school day, John,” he said. He was taking it all in—the papers, the photographs, the empty beer bottles, Riel’s bleary eyes, his hair that was standing up in places, probabl
y from running his fingers through it while he read or thought or drank. Detective Jones reached down, put a finger on one of the photographs, and spun it around.

  “Where’d you get this stuff, John?”

  Riel didn’t answer.

  “You think this is a good idea?” Detective Jones said.

  “What’s up, Dave?” Riel said.

  Detective Jones looked at the photo again, but if you ask me, that wasn’t what he was thinking about.

  “Just checking to make sure you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine.” There was a snap to the words.

  I backed up a little, out of their line of sight so there’d be less chance that one or the other of them would tell me to go upstairs or go to school.

  Detective Jones pulled out a chair and sat down. “Maybe you should see someone,” he said. “You know, make sure you’re okay.”

  “Is that why you’re here?” Riel said. “To see if maybe I need to pay a visit to my shrink?”

  His shrink?

  Detective Jones shook his head. “I’m here because you’re my friend. Because I care what happens to you. Especially now.”

  “Meaning?” Another hard, tight delivery.

  “Meaning it’s not just you now, John. You’ve got the kid to think about.”

  He meant me. But neither of them turned to look at me. Neither of them shooed me away either.

  They sat there across the table from each other for a moment. Then Detective Jones said, “We’ve identified the body.”

  Riel leaned forward.

  “Gerard de la Rivière.”

  Riel leaned forward a little more. They stared at each other. Then Riel said, “Let me get this straight. The gun that was used to kill Tracie Howard was also used to kill de la Rivière. That’s what you’re saying?”

  Detective Jones nodded.

  Riel said, “You got a theory?”

  “I got the only explanation I can think of that fits.”

  I wondered what the explanation was and inched forward so that I could see them both clearly.

  Riel was shaking his head. “How does that make sense?”