by Ron Corbett
She looked up at him and said, “You are alive, Detective Yakabuski. That must be a good sign.”
“It is. You have saved our lives, Madame.”
“For today at least. I hope you can make good use of the extra time.”
Yakabuski smiled. That was it in a nutshell. People born and raised along the Northern Divide or the Upper Springfield Valley, they were never fooled about what was on offer in this world. You hoped to put together more good days than bad. You hoped if you worked hard, you could take care of your family. You accepted that you lived in a country that could kill you for the slightest of missteps, but you looked forward to waking up in that country every morning because that country never deceived you, never subjugated you, never claimed to be more than what it was. A tough country, but if you paid attention, you could find what you needed.
He squeezed her hands and said, “Yes, Madame, we will make good use of the extra time. I promise you.”
She didn’t say anything more. As life ebbed from her eyes, Yakabuski watched and hoped she had been given enough time herself to travel to the place all old people carry with them, the place they hope to be when the time comes, the memory they hope to leave with. He felt with a certainty that surprised him that Anita Diamond had gone back to Five Mile Camp.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
He found the key to the handcuffs in Bangles’ parka. The waitress was in shock when she was released, and Yakabuski held her to his chest, almost disappearing the girl.
“Breathe deep, child,” he said. “Top to bottom. Move it down your spine.” He breathed with her. “You’re from Buckham’s Bay, right?”
“Yeesss.”
“Say the word in your head. Buckham. Let it fall apart. The syllables. Buck. Ham. Buck. Ham. Are you doing that?”
Against his chest, she nodded.
“Keep doing it. Keep breathing.”
“Buck. Ham. Buck. Ham.” Her teeth chattered, but after a few minutes, her speech slowed, the syllables landing further and further apart.
When she was asleep, the tree-marker scooped her into his arms, turned to Yakabuski, and said, “I’m going to take her to one of the rooms. Get her out of here.”
Yakabuski looked around at the bodies of John Holly and Tommy Bangles, Anita Diamond and Bobby Chance.
“Good idea,” he said.
. . .
The man who had been calling himself Tobias O’Keefe did nothing to help. As Yakabuski talked down the waitress, as the tree-marker swaddled her in warm towels and took her to a room, he stood and watched them work. Just as often, he stared out the front window, the storm now passed and the sun come to bear late witness to the day.
He was not in shock. Yakabuski knew that. He was assessing. Not moving yet because he was not sure what his next move should be. Yakabuski went and stood beside him.
“You have the same name as your father?” he asked.
“No. Same as my grandfather. Thomas. I’m the third.”
“Thomas O’Hearn the Third?”
“That’s right. The waitress will be fine, by the way. I suspect you know that.”
“I suspect. She’s in good hands at the moment. I know that.”
“I’ve seen plenty of people in shock. At one of the mills in Springfield, I once saw a man lose an arm. He stood there swearing at anyone who tried to approach him, telling them to back off, they were full of shit, nothing was wrong with him. He stood there swearing and throwing blood all over the place. He was lucky he didn’t bleed out right on the floor.”
“People react different when they’re in shock. It depends on what you’re scared of in this world. Sounds like that fellow was scared of losing his job.”
O’Hearn laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that. I just thought he was crazy. What do you think the waitress was scared of?”
“Don’t know if the girl needs much more than the last twenty minutes.”
O’Hearn laughed again. He seemed to think nothing of it — being amused at life while the expanse of all possible things dimmed from the eyes of people dying around him; while they became finite and dead, with specimen-jar eyes where there had been living eyes only moments ago. Thought nothing of it.
The two men began to step carefully around the broken glass and busted furniture, making their way to the fireplace without conversation or question. As though it had been agreed upon earlier.
“So, what happens next?” asked O’Hearn, when they were standing by the hearth.
“The storm is over. Police will be coming on tomorrow’s train. I suspect we’ll have most of the force out here by the end of the day.”
“They’ll use planes?”
“They’ll use anything that moves.”
“Do we need to do anything before they get here?”
“No.”
“The bodies?”
“They need to stay right where they are.”
“So we are at rather loose ends until the police arrive?”
“No. We’re waiting.”
Yakabuski went to the timber box, rummaged around, and took out the three largest pieces of pine he could find. He placed two on the embers, the third at his feet. Flames licked the wood almost immediately. Grew and ran in shifting patterns over the thick grain while sap began to bubble and ooze. The fire bloomed from yellow to orange to vermillion, and when there was a soft, shimmering cap of blue to the flames, Yakabuski added the third chunk of wood.
He sat down and examined his work. After a minute, he turned to O’Hearn and said, “Did you know Lucy Whiteduck was here when you came up, or did that come as a surprise?”
. . .
It was as though the room changed when Yakabuski said it. A physical thing, not imagined. The walls contracted. The air grew thin. O’Hearn did not turn to look at him, and so Yakabuski kept talking.
“I’m inclined to think it was a surprise. That story you’re telling about the mill reopening, it’s true, isn’t it? Otherwise, why would you have brought Garrett? I figure you saw her when they came in to cash that cheque last week. She saw Tommy Bangles, but she never saw you. That’s a funny thing.”
O’Hearn’s face appeared tired when he finally turned to look at Yakabuski. When he spoke, his voice was flat and distant, like some radio signal you pull in late at night.
“What are you talking about, Detective?”
“How long had it been since you last saw her? Twelve years, right? Twelve years at least. Did you recognize her right away? I figure you must have. I don’t think you could forget a face like that.”
The room continued to change, the sounds of the Mattamy gathering around the two men like congregants summoned to a late-night service. The bass tick of a stand-up clock. The hum of a fluorescent light. The gurgle of water running in a pipe. It seemed the soft murmur of an orchestra pit before a performance.
“Life’s strange, isn’t it, Mr. O’Hearn?” continued Yakabuski. “Everything goes away but nothing really goes away, does it? Not in any true way. My dad thinks stuff goes away. He used to fish this lake. He told me once, when something is gone, it’s gone. I think he was wrong about that. I think everything comes back. You can go years thinking you’re free and clear of something, something bad from your past, maybe even convince yourself it never happened, then one day it just walks right in, sits down beside you, and says, ‘Hey, remember me?’”
“Detective, I’m going to have to insist you start making some sense here, or I’ll—”
“When did you know you were going to kill her?”
The last of the air whooshed out of the room. O’Hearn tried to rise from his chair but only stood a second before sitting back down, the sequence seeming feigned somehow. As though anger was an emotion from long ago that O’Hearn was having trouble recalling. He sat there moving his lips, but no sound came out.
“Did you know y
ou were going to kill her as soon as you saw her? I’d like to know the answer to that one. It’s one of only two questions I have left for you. So this shouldn’t take long.”
O’Hearn tried again to look angry. Then confused. Then he let a benevolent and slightly aggrieved expression settle upon his face before saying, “Detective Yakabuski, why don’t you tell me what you think you have?”
And so he did.
. . .
Yakabuski began by saying he wasn’t sure if Johnny Whiteduck knew from the start that O’Hearn was raping his daughter. He didn’t think it mattered much. So that wasn’t one of his two questions. Whiteduck certainly knew by the end, and sometimes that’s all that matters. Foreknowledge, intent, things like that, are almost irrelevant when you’re talking about raping little girls.
Yakabuski had done the math and come up with ten years. The age Lucy Whiteduck would have been when the young O’Hearn had first taken her to bed. It would have gone on the next three years, was the reason he came back to Ragged Lake every summer and one full year after graduation. That had nothing to do with his father. Nothing to do with love of the people who lived here. Everything to do with a beautiful, onyx-haired Indian girl and the way her body must have looked in shadows and dim light.
She didn’t have much in the way of family, just her daddy, and her daddy wasn’t stupid or a drunkard, so he must have known what was going on well enough. He must have been all right with it, too, so long as there was a mill around where he could be foreman. That’s another funny thing about life. How often people build everything they have on lousy footings. Bad land. Stupid dreams.
Yakabuski doubted, given O’Hearn’s age at the time, that he wanted to kill Johnny Whiteduck. The decision was probably forced upon him. It was not learned behaviour yet, the way being nasty and brutish would become for men like him. He figured Whiteduck had tried to blackmail him.
“But he didn’t know what kind of man he was dealing with, did he, Mr. O’Hearn?”
O’Hearn didn’t say anything and Yakabuski didn’t wait for an answer. “Your mistake was that you didn’t kill her at the same time. You were young and stupid, so you did the murder, cleaned up, covered your tracks, went into hiding for a while, laying low. You would have done all that before it occurred to you that one murder wasn’t going to solve your problem. You needed two.
“But by then she was gone. And you’ve spent a dozen years wondering if she might one day come back. So tell me, Mr. O’Hearn, did you know you were going to kill Lucy Whiteduck as soon as you saw her?”
Again, O’Hearn seemed slow to rise. Like some fat fish coming lazily off the shoals. He gave a long, languid roll of his head.
“For argument’s sake, Detective — just to indulge you and only because I am extremely tired — what possible difference would that make? You are not asking if I killed the girl, only when I had decided to kill her. Do I have that right?”
“You do. And you’re right; it won’t make much difference. You’d be a murdering, narcissistic pedophile either way. It would just help me with the psychopath part.”
The two men stared at each other a long time. Eventually, a small smile came to each face, first to O’Hearn’s, then to Yakabuski’s, and after that a tip of the head, almost in unison, an unspoken acknowledgement of work well done.
“You’re wrong about Johnny,” O’Hearn said, his voice sounding a little stronger. “You need to do a rethink on that one. It’s always been a bit of mystery to me, what happened to Johnny Whiteduck. As for his daughter,” and here O’Hearn stopped to make a lazy roll of his shoulders, working out some kinks in his neck, “I suppose I knew right away that I needed to kill her.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The gathered sounds of the Mattamy seemed to run up and down a sad minor scale. The bass tick of time. The mid-range of light. The high keen of water.
“The little girl was a surprise, then?”
“A complete surprise,” said O’Hearn. “I had no idea there was a child in that cabin. I didn’t see her when they came into the lodge.”
“Did you kill her right away, too?”
“I don’t think . . . you’re doing people a favour when you’re indecisive about certain things. You probably know that.”
“How did you manage to get the jump on a man like Guillaume Roy?”
“Wasn’t that hard, really. He struck me as a bit naïve. He invited me into the cabin. I got the impression he was worried about bikers, not someone like me.”
“You used his shotgun.”
“Yes.”
“She wasn’t there.”
“That’s right.”
“What did you make her do when she got home?”
O’Hearn smiled again. But it was a sad sort of smile. Something distant and joyless. “Have you seen photos of Lucy? I have some that would quite amaze you.”
“You’re a sick bastard.”
“Maybe. I’m not sure. But a question for you now, Detective Yakabuski. Do you really think any of this matters?”
Yakabuski leaned back in his chair, put his hands under his chin, and struck the pose of a man preparing to listen.
“You know what I’m going to say?” said O’Hearn.
“I suspect.”
“Well, it’s true. I will deny everything I’ve just said. If it ever came to court, it would be your word against mine. My lawyer will say you snapped under the pressure. Everyone at Ragged Lake was killed by bikers. That’s a much more believable story than what you will be peddling.”
Yakabuski looked at O’Hearn, then at his watch, wondering if he should take the time to argue. Go through the details with him. The various testimonies. The various witnesses. They had the time for it. But he decided he was too tired.
“You may be right about that, Mr. O’Hearn. But I’m still going to arrest you. There will be a trial. I will testify at the trial. Maybe you’ll get off like you say, I’m not sure, but it won’t happen until everyone in Springfield knows you like to sleep with little girls.”
“But I’ll be acquitted.”
“Maybe. Won’t stop people from knowing.”
O’Hearn sat there, and the first honest emotion Yakabuski had seen from the man seemed to come over him. His eyes registered quick surprise. His hands gripped the arm of the chair with enough force to turn his knuckles pinch-white. His brow furrowed, sculpting deep recesses in his forehead, lines that Yakabuski had not seen until then.
“I’m going to stop talking now,” he said.
“Was Lucy the only one?”
“Detective, I must insist that—”
“Of course not. It never is. You look tired, Mr. O’Hearn. Tired and spent. You know that?”
“Where are you going with this?”
“Maybe you’re tired of having a secret life. Maybe the best thing to do right now would be to not fight this. You’re caught. Accept it.”
O’Hearn laughed and rolled his eyes. His mannerisms again seemed feigned. “You have a gift for drama, Mr. Yakabuski. I thought that was an Irish failing, not a Polish one. Just to humour me, and only because we have the time, what was your second question?”
“Are you really going to reopen the mill? Is that the reason you’re up here?”
“Why in the world would you care about something like that?”
“I’m curious to know if people are going back to work.”
“What an odd man you are. Well, yes, if you’re that curious, we are planning on reopening the mill. It is the reason I am here. The only reason I came here.”
“Japanese magazines? That’s what’s going to get people back to work?”
“Yes.”
“So what’s going to happen when I arrest you for murder and rape? What’s going to happen to those plans?”
Again, O’Hearn seemed caught off guard. He stammered at f
irst and had to start over. “It would probably end them.”
“O’Hearn is a publicly traded company. How do you think that will play out?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I figure you’re bankrupt. I figure the company is going to shut down. I figure your family is ruined. What do you figure, Mr. O’Hearn? You’re big on figuring.”
O’Hearn didn’t say anything.
. . .
Yakabuski had accused the man of being tired, but he was probably more tired. Tired of living in a world where people who played by the rules always came out the losers, while people like Thomas O’Hearn III always came out the winners, and for no better or different reason than that people like O’Hearn were ruthless sociopaths with a piece missing inside them. A void that ensured they never cared about people and never lost sleep about anything they did to people, a missing piece that made them inhuman, successful, and rich.
Men like Thomas O’Hearn III not only destroyed people, they destroyed history and shared achievement, towns and communities, everything people had spent centuries building and treasuring. Yakabuski remembered a time when work, the survival and comfort of every working family, that was assured. You could shake hands on it. Now he looked around and saw people so frightened, so kicked around and debased, so worried about their futures, they might as well be foraging beasts. Meanwhile, people like O’Hearn kept buying ever-larger summer homes and sailing ships.
He had a chance to bring down O’Hearn and show him for the monster he was. Show everyone the fallacy in how people were behaving these days, trying to get ahead on whatever back was laid out in front of them. Like it was normal. Like it had to be done that way.
But by doing this, he would hurt the people he was trying to help, his family and neighbours, the ones he had sworn to protect and serve. He would be the one hurting them. Yakabuski was suddenly overcome with fatigue, a wet, soggy, two-thousand-pound sort of tired.
