by Ron Corbett
. . .
“You have a family, Mr. O’Hearn?”
“Two boys and a girl. You?”
“No children. Lots of everything else. They tell me it changes you, having children.”
“It does.”
“You love those children?”
“I do.”
“You loved your father?”
“I did.”
“You may have another option here.”
“Would we be talking about a bribe?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Are you interested?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“You have two of them.”
Yakabuski took his service revolver from his parka pocket, ejected some shells, and put the gun on the table in front of them. Both men stared at it for a minute. The fire was now burning brightly, the shadows it cast broad and vibrant upon the wall.
“There’s one bullet in the breach,” said Yakabuski.
“What will your story be?”
“Bikers.”
“But the tree-marker, the waitress . . .”
“The waitress won’t recall anything. Leave the tree-marker to me.”
O’Hearn stared at the gun.
After a few seconds, Yakabuski said, “Unless you have that gun pushed to the back of my head and I’m sitting here not doing anything about it, I wouldn’t try it.”
“I figured that. It makes sense what you’re saying. I’m not sure I can do it.”
“You must have considered it. With what you’ve been doing all these years. You must have considered your worst-case scenario.”
“Many times. Never thought it would come today. You’ll say it was bikers?”
“I’ll say it was Tommy Bangles.”
“He’s the . . .”
“Teardrop tattoos.”
O’Hearn stared over at Bangles’ body and nodded.
“It seems so unnatural. Like nothing I would ever do.”
“Do you need help?”
“You really don’t think the tree-marker or the waitress—”
“I don’t.”
“It’s a pity I won’t be able to pass along any last words to my family.”
“That can happen.”
Yakabuski picked up the handgun, asked O’Hearn to turn his head. Before firing he said, “If it makes you feel any better, Mr. O’Hearn, this may be the only decent thing you’ve ever done.”
FIREFLIES IN THE SNOW III
Yakabuski found the photos tucked inside the endpapers of the journal, along with a sprig of dried flowers, although it was hard to tell what type of flowers they may once have been. Not roses.
He laid the photos on the bar. It was 4 a.m. The tree-marker and the waitress were somewhere in the east wing. Bodies lay where they had fallen, waiting for the Ident cops that would be arriving in the morning. There would be no sleep that night. He had not even tried.
The first photo was a group of people standing and hoisting quarts of beer, surrounded by the wooden walls, round tables, and Pas des Drug signs of a tavern in the French Line. The old Claude Tavern perhaps. Or the Richelieu. It looked vaguely familiar to Yakabuski. All the people in the photo were Indian and their clothing was dated. Stone-washed jeans. Gap T-shirts. All had Christmas garlands around their necks.
Yakabuski took his time scanning the photo — there were eleven people — although it was easy to spot him. He stood a couple of inches taller than everyone else. Dressed not in a T-shirt but what looked like a button-down oxford and a tie with a flying duck pattern on it. Johnny Whiteduck. Smiling, laughing, and getting ready to lead his band of late-night revellers on some Christmas folly, his eyes blazing like a cook fire, the strongest pigmentation left in the old photo, the maniacal eyes of the handsome man in the foreground.
He had his left arm thrown around a woman a good head and a half shorter. She had sleek black hair that she wore long. Not one but two Christmas garlands wrapped around her neck. She wore a tight red sweater. There was no date on the photo. No names. It was creased and worn and almost like newsprint.
The next photo was that of a teenage girl. This photo had a date on the back — August 2, 2004 — along with a man’s name and a stamp from Family Support Services, the child welfare agency in Springfield.
The girl was beautiful. More than that. She possessed a beauty that was extraordinary, a face so perfect it stopped you from breathing for a second, left you searching for the right word to describe her, so inadequate would language suddenly seem in comparison to what was right there in front of you.
Lucy Whiteduck. At the age of sixteen.
There was a smile on her face but only slight. She stared straight ahead. No tilt to the head or slouch to the spine. A confident girl. Yet not the confidence you often see in attractive children who have found the world pleasant and welcoming, every journey an easy stroll on level ground, every door wide open. Something different. Something earned and claimed. Yakabuski stared at the photo a long time, wondering what a girl like that could do with a full life.
The next photo was of Guillaume Roy. His hair was clipped short and he wore the maroon beret of the Special Forces Regiment. Yakabuski went down the line of medals on his chest — Bosnia Service Medal, Meritorious Conduct Medal, the disbandment medal given to members of the old Airborne Regiment. Just like Lucy Whiteduck, Roy stared straight ahead, unflinching, no slackness to his posture, no give to his face. You could see in the line of the jaw, and the eyes perhaps — a dark denim blue that had not faded over the years — a hint of the man Yakabuski had found in the squatters’ cabin. But only a hint. And only when you stared long and hard at the photo and used your imagination.
Two government-issue photos. Yakabuski looked from one to the other and wondered if there had been more, if these two had been chosen for safekeeping because she’d liked them best. It took him only a few seconds to decide that, no, they probably wouldn’t have had more.
The fourth photo had another date on the back — May 9, 2013 — although there was something old-looking about it. It had been taken in a photo booth, the kind you used to see in drugstores and bus stations. Yakabuski figured he knew the location of every photo booth in Springfield — there were only three left — so he was pretty sure the photo had been taken at the Stedman’s in Sandy Hill. A store close to where Lucy Whiteduck had lived.
Her beauty had not diminished from the teenage photo taken years earlier by some bureaucrat at Family Support Services. Her hair was still the hue of a northern lake when summer had gone but winter not yet come, the way deep dark water looks when lit at night by stars and a low moon. Her skin was the colour of white sand after a light rain. Her eyes were almond coloured, if you were pressed to use only one word, a shade of light brown he had rarely seen before.
Guillaume sat next to her. His hair had grown out and he looked a bit like Kurt Cobain, a handsome man, though his face was heavily lined and he looked older than what Yakabuski knew him to be. He seemed happy. His arm was thrown around Lucy and he was looking at her, not the camera, leaning in so as to suggest the next photo would be him kissing her cheek. But there was only the one picture, not the strip you always get at a photo booth. Yakabuski wondered what they might have done with the other photos, but no answer seemed right to him.
In the middle of the photo, sitting on Lucy’s lap, was the girl. A newborn that you could tell was going to look like her mother. Her hair was black. The eyes soft brown. Whiteduck was holding the child in a way that kept her head erect, her small, unfocused eyes turned to the flash, making it seem the girl knew what was happening, was posing for the camera, cognizant and curious, ready for her grand adventure.
It was a difficult photo to look at, knowing the family’s fate, but Yakabuski kept staring at it, looking for signs they might have known w
hat was coming. Or that one of them knew, perhaps even the child. Yakabuski believed such a thing might be possible, that knowledge could migrate by way of genes, synapse, and blood, not only by experience and knowledge; that there was such a thing as primeval intuition in this world and he had known and believed in such things ever since he’d learned that songbirds returned to the same Mexican river every winter. Would a child knowing its fate be any stranger than that? Would it seem unnatural by comparison?
But he never found a clue. Never found himself looking at anything more than a bus station photo of a happy couple with a newborn baby.
Shortly before sunrise, much to his later surprise, Frank Yakabuski fell asleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Yakabuski never doubted the tree-marker, what the boy would say when police arrived. The first ones came on the 11 a.m. train from High River, and by dusk, Ragged Lake resembled Springfield on a Saturday night. Red and blue flashing lights. The low rumble of cold engines. The whir of metal. The shouts of people in a panic.
Twenty-one dead. That was the final tally, confirmed only five days later when an Ident team could safely get into the basement of the meth lab and found the body of a woman, never identified. It was a crime scene none of the cops had seen or contemplated before, a majestic, soaring, incomprehensible cockup that filled most of them with awe despite their best efforts to be repulsed. They simply could not help themselves. There was something about Ragged Lake that gave their work an import and grandeur they had never experienced before. As though they had just landed in one of the bad days of history.
No cop asked as much as a follow-up question when the tree-marker said he didn’t know how Thomas O’Hearn III had died. He’d just showed up dead. Like everyone else.
. . .
The story was front-page news across the country, international news for many days, the police not the only ones left incredulous by the scale of what had happened in Ragged Lake. The funeral for O’Hearn was covered by media outlets as far away as Japan, each one going with a narrative of O’Hearn being a folk hero for coming to the Northern Divide in the dead of winter to personally oversee the reopening of a shuttered pulp and paper mill. A rich scion who had loved this blue-collar town. Who had once worked at the mill. O’Hearn was cast as a corporate do-gooder tragically caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, a victim of quirky fate, as though he had died in an airplane crash while delivering medical supplies to a remote African village.
The funeral was lavish, the reception the social event of the season, and the opening of the Ragged Lake mill became a thing ordained. It happened that July, after a $15 million retrofit. Within a month it was running two shifts. O’Hearn had been overly cautious in his estimations.
. . .
Police officers from four different agencies stayed in Ragged Lake until spring to finish the forensic work. The last ones left the weekend after pickerel season opened. The owners of the Mattamy had planned to tear down the main wing of the lodge and build something new, so there would be no reminders of what had happened, but before they could get started and right after the S and P was firm enough to allow for automobile traffic, the town was overrun with visitors. Late-to-the-story journalists. Bike-gang cultists.Tourists attracted by the brutality of what had happened, who would be visiting the OK Corral next summer. People who came to stay at the Mattamy because of what everyone agreed after a few weeks should be called “The Battle of Ragged Lake” outnumbered fishermen for several years. The owners kept the bar and restaurant. Added rooms to the east and west wings.
. . .
Tommy Bangles’ cellphone was encrypted, and so it was sent to a lab in Toronto for analysis. In mid-April, Yakabuski got a phone call from an investigator who said they had managed to lift a couple of numbers from the phone. One traced back to Sean Morrissey. The other was a mystery. It seemed to be a working number. No way of knowing where it was located, and they had been working on it for weeks. They figured they had one chance to call the number before it disappeared for all time. They had a meeting the day before to decide who might be the best person to place the call. Yakabuski won the vote.
“I’m sure it’s all academic, Detective,” the investigator said. “There is no way we’re getting a physical location from this number. We rarely get that lucky, and this is one mother-protected number. Some people down here are in awe of it. At the same time, we shouldn’t assume failure, right? We should at least have someone place a call, someone who might stand a chance of keeping the other person talking. You got picked.”
“Why?”
The investigator shrugged. “We’re pissing in the dark. But you killed Tommy Bangles. Maybe someone is angry enough about that to cuss you out a bit.”
“A full meeting for that?”
“Lunch too. But aren’t you a little curious, Detective? I understand Bangles may have talked to you about some new partners he and Morrissey had taken on. Before he died.”
“He did.”
“Well, this could be one of those people. What do you say? We’re all set up on our end. We can place the call right now. You just have to stay on the line with me.”
“All right.”
There were some clicking sounds, and then the phone started ringing. It rang a long time and then stopped. Yakabuski thought the call had failed, but then he heard a man sigh and say, “Detective Yakabuski. I was about to give up on you.”
“You were expecting my call?”
“Yes. It would have given me great happiness to have thrown away this phone. To have misjudged you. But I knew I had not. So, the thing I have been waiting to tell you: Move on, my friend. Consider Ragged Lake your lucky break.”
“Don’t know if I can do that.”
“Why not? I hear you are a smart man.”
“Two dead cops.”
“You wish to make it three?”
“I’ll find you.”
“I don’t think so. And why should you bother? You came out a winner in Ragged Lake. Why tempt fate?”
“Lots of dead people. I figure there should be some sort of accounting for a thing like that.”
“Why? Lots of dead people everywhere. Sometimes lots of dead people because of you, my friend.”
“Quit calling me your friend. Tommy said you were some new sort of whacked-out freak. Something truly fuckin’ evil. Now that I’m talking to you, I think you’re a pussy. Sitting miles from the action and talking big. Like some pussy general.”
Yakabuski heard a longer sigh this time. The man sounded older when he spoke again, although Yakabuski had trouble deciding how old.
“I have been to Springfield. Do you know that? Many times. I am not a ghost on the phone. You have a good city. A good country. A great big country where a man can disappear, forget about his sins. It is a country made for absolution. Go away, Detective. Forget this ever happened.”
“I have a better plan. Why don’t I track you down and piss in your fuckin’ mouth.”
Again there was a long pause before the man spoke. But no sigh this time. No tired voice. “Come after me, and you are a dead man,” he said. “You and everyone you hold dear. Your sister. Your crippled father. That is a promise I make to you, my friend.”
Nothing more was said. A moment later, the investigator from Toronto was back, breathless and excited.
“My man, did you hear that? Did you flipping hear that?”
“I heard that.”
“That was flipping gangster shit. Right out of the movies.”
“Were you able to trace the call?”
“What? Oh, no. Fuck no. Worth a shot, though, right?”
Yakabuski didn’t bother answering.
. . .
That June, when no one came forward to claim the bodies of Guillaume Roy, Lucy Whiteduck, or their daughter, Yakabuski made arrangements with the coroner to have the bodies cremated. He picked u
p the cardboard urns at a crematory company in an industrial park near the Nosoto Projects one Saturday morning and drove to Strathconna Park. He took ash from each urn and tossed it into the Springfield River. By a kayak course. Yakabuski took a minute to look at the kayakers bob down the strong current of the river, twisting and turning, their colourful rain gear flashing through the mist and spray.
He spoke to a city worker and borrowed a spade. Took what was left of the ashes and combined them in one urn, and this he buried beneath a crabapple tree in late bloom. The city worker was going to say something about the burial, but Yakabuski showed him his badge, and so the boy stood silent until the job was finished.
“That looks like a good, healthy tree,” said Yakabuski, when he returned the spade.
“It is. ’Bout ten years old. They have great roots, those apple trees.”
“How long do they live?”
“They bear fruit for forty, fifty years, live a long time after that. There’s apple trees just like it on the other side of the river that have probably been there since before the Shiners.”
Yakabuski thanked the boy for the use of the spade and left the park.
. . .
Later that summer O’Hearn also reopened one of its shutdown Springfield mills. A few months after, the tree-marker began working there, a decision that surprised Yakabuski when he first heard of it but made sense when he met the boy for drinks two weeks before Christmas. The tree-marker brought the waitress. She looked to be in her third trimester.
“When is the baby due?” he asked.
“End of January,” Marie answered.
“Do you know yet if it’s a boy or a girl?”
“No, we want to be surprised.”
“I would think you’d had your fill of surprises this year, Marie. I’d like to know what colour to paint the nursery.”
They laughed, and Yakabuski turned to the tree-marker. “So how’s the mill treating you?”
