A Door in the River

by Inger Ash Wolfe

  Emily sighed deeply. “I’m not a shitty cook.”

  “You burn tea, Mother.”

  Emily turned over onto her back, a compromise between ignoring her daughter and looking at her. “Your speeches must rally your troops to joyful insubordination.”

  In profile, her mother’s face was like a broken half of something. Her nose was thinner and sharper, her cheekbones stuck out of her face like tiny elbows. “Are you feeling a little better?”

  “They’re pumping me full of chocolate malts.”

  “Something like that.” She got out of the chair and sat on the edge of the bed. Her mother’s eyes tracked over to her. “You’re going to be eighty-eight in a week and a half –”

  “Is this the pep talk continuing?”

  “Let’s have a party. Drinks and everything, screw Dr. Pass’s injunctions. We’ll get everyone together.”

  “A party of scarecrows.”

  “We’ll change the mood in the house, Mother. Say yes. It’ll be good for both of us.”

  Her mother shook her head slowly. “I don’t want any bloody parties. Save it for the wake.”

  ______

  While her mother napped, Hazel waited for Greene, Forbes, and Wingate to arrive at the hospital, where she had arranged to use an empty chapel as a meeting place. Greene arrived with a large bouquet of flowers for Emily and left them at the nursing station, unaware that Hazel could see him from the window in the door. She wanted to hate him for trying so hard to seem like a good man. Then she remembered that he’d always been a good man. She was the one who had driven him out and only her shame and her pride prevented her from seeing him now the way she’d once seen him. This thought arrived whole, slipping in alongside her worries.

  She opened the door to the chapel. “In here,” she called to them.

  “How is she?” Wingate inquired when the door was closed behind them. There were four pews inside the small room with an aisle running down the middle, a podium with a cloth draped over it, and a stained-glass window that was actually a glass box with a few lightbulbs in it. They arranged themselves at the ends of pews like four priests having a convocation.

  “She’s stable,” Hazel said. She found she couldn’t look any of them in the eye. “I stopped seeing her. I stopped noticing.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Wingate said.

  “She doesn’t want to live. How do you make a person want to live?”

  The three men nodded, acknowledging her difficulties, but, like most people, they didn’t know what to say. Wingate said, “Cherry gave a name. She said Kitty would kill a man named Sugar. I’ve already looked through six Westmuir directories. There are, like, eighty people with that name in the county.”

  “Mr. Sugar.”

  “If that’s his real name. I’m René Arsenault now.” He dug into the inner pocket of his jacket and removed the laminated ID card in Arsenault’s name. He handed it to Hazel.

  “He gave you this?” she asked.

  “Someone in that place could make a fake ID in less than three minutes. It looks real, too. There’s even a hologram in it.”

  She held it up to the light and tilted it back and forth. “So they have a way of assigning memberships to false names and they generate their own ID. That’s how they know who’s getting into the cabs. They take reservations or something. Or there’s something on the ID that confirms membership.” She ran her hand along the surface, feeling a difference in textures, and held it against the light again. “You were lucky this Ronnie didn’t run your own fake ID. Christ. He figured you got in legitimately, and he didn’t check. Now you’re in for real.”

  “But I have to reserve. Or arrange a time, or something like that. I don’t think you can just swan in …”

  “So how?”

  “Wherever it is you sign up in the first place and they issue you your ID. There’s probably only one way to communicate with them.” He held his hand out for the card, but she’d slipped it into her pocket.

  “Hold on a second,” she said. “I know where it is. It’s the casino. Five Nations. That’s why they ask you for your driver’s licence.”

  “Back up?”

  “You go to the pickup window and they hand you back a brand-new Five Nations players card and your driver’s licence. Like everyone else. The thing is, you never gave them your licence in the first place.”

  “The card they give you operates the door,” said Forbes.

  Wingate looked at him, a little sharply, Hazel thought. “I know that,” he said. “And the name I registered with the service is on the card they made for me.”

  “So how do you arrange a second visit?”

  By mid-afternoon, her mother’s colour had returned. As far as Hazel could tell, they’d now pumped about ten litres of fluid and nutrition into her and damned if she didn’t look fresh as a three-day-old daisy.

  “How are you?”

  “I feel reanimated. Like Frankenstein’s monster.”

  “You just needed watering.”

  “Don’t get too used to this. My miraculous comebacks.”

  “I’ll take what I can get.”

  She spent the rest of the afternoon annoying the nurses at their station, reading the newspaper standing up, and making and receiving phone calls. She went back and forth to her mother, bringing water, magazines, and cookies. She was taking an early supper with her when one of the exasperated nurses came into the room to tell her she was wanted again.

  It was Wingate, waiting out by the nurses’ station. “How’s she doing now?”

  “They’re still rehydrating her. She was like a dried-out old washcloth.”

  “Did you get what we need?” He passed her a metal-barrelled penlight. “Let’s go over here.”

  He followed her into a supply closet. “I don’t think this looks very good, you and me walking into a closet together.”

  “Shut up. Turn off the light.” He did, and she snapped the penlight on and took the Arsenault ID out of her pocket. “There was a texture on the surface of the laminate,” she said, and she shone the light over the card.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing I can see. But there’s something there.” She passed the card to him and he ran his fingertips over the laminate.

  “I think it’s just the texture of the plastic.”

  She turned off the flashlight and they were both silent in the darkness for a moment.

  “I wonder if the cafeteria here takes big bills,” she said. She opened the door and light flooded the little room. One of the nurses was turning a corner and saw them standing there, in the near dark. “We were playing with our two-way radios,” she told her, and the nurse pulled her head back on her neck and continued on her way.

  They took the elevator down to the cafeteria and went directly to the cashier. “What are you doing?” Wingate whispered.

  “Watch this,” she said. She went up to the cash. “Excuse me, but do you take large bills?”

  “We do,” said a lady with a hairnet.

  “Do you check them?”

  The lady noticed Wingate was in uniform. “We’re supposed to. Do you have a bad bill you want me to check?”

  “Yes,” said Hazel, and she dug out the ID again. “Check this.”

  The woman looked at the ID, perplexed, but then she did what she was told and removed a little handheld device from a drawer below her cash register. Hazel took it from her. It was a banknote verifier with a UV light in it. Hazel switched it on and slipped the ID under the light.

  “Oh, well,” said Wingate.

  “Look at that.”

  Struck out in ghostly purple, the image of a sparrow in flight floated over the printed data on the card. And below the form of the animal were five characters:

  .info

  ] 27 [

  Early afternoon

  Hazel and Wingate went to visit Cathy Wiest at Ursula Greene’s B&B. She was ensconced on the patio, sitting at a wrought-iron t
able and sipping an iced tea under a clear sky when they appeared. She froze at the sight of them. “It’s okay, Cathy.”

  “Do I have to go home?” Her eyes darted back and forth between them.

  “Not yet, not if you don’t want to,” Hazel said. “Ursula says you can stay as long as you like.”

  “Okay,” she said, and she visibly relaxed.

  It was terrible to see this proud woman reduced to a state of numbness, as terrible as it was to watch her mother begin to give up the ghost. So much of life was contingent. No one could tell you it wasn’t, nor that you wouldn’t suddenly be subject to its contingencies. Cathy Wiest’s nerves were shot. It was going to take a long time to bring her back to the world.

  Hazel hadn’t wanted to come up and disturb her further, but they’d agreed that the prior connection between Jordie Dunn and Henry Wiest had warranted it. They had to know what Dunn had meant when he said that Henry was trying to help the girl they now knew as Kitty. How did Henry come into contact with her? Was Henry just another client of Sparrow’s, one who had a change of heart? Or had he and Kitty somehow made contact with each other another way? Through Dunn, for instance?

  They knew they were going to have to go back into that terrible place. But whether Wingate went in as René Arsenault or they just busted it wide open depended on what their options were. Maybe there was another way, a way Dunn had shown Henry Wiest.

  Hazel sat down at the patio table beside her and put her hand on Cathy’s. The grief-stricken woman looked at it like she’d never seen a hand before. Wingate stood a few feet away, trying to give them some privacy.

  “We’ve made some progress,” Hazel said. “We think we know what Henry was doing at the smoke shop in Queesik Bay.”

  “Oh?” A flicker behind her eyes.

  “We think he was trying to help someone. A young woman who had been … mistreated. The woman who came to your house.”

  “The girl who killed him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did she kill him if he was trying to help her?”

  “We don’t know that yet.”

  “Are you sure he was trying to help her?”

  “No,” said Hazel quietly, sorry to have to tell Cathy Wiest the truth as she so far understood it. The truth was, they still couldn’t tell the victims from the perpetrators. And it was possible, as it was always possible, that Henry Wiest had not been who he’d seemed.

  Cathy’s gaze tracked over Hazel’s shoulder to Wingate. There was a low, gentle breeze playing in her hair. She looked like an old woman to him. “Have you caught her?” she asked him. “Is that why you’re here? To tell me you’ve caught her?”

  Hazel squeezed the woman’s hand, bringing her back. “We don’t have her yet. But we’re getting closer. We just need to ask you a couple more questions.”

  She pulled her hand out from under Hazel’s. “How is Beedle?”

  “Beedle?”

  “My bird?”

  “Oh. Beedle is fine. He’s at the station house.”

  “She,” Cathy said distantly. “Beedle is a girl.”

  Wingate stepped forward and took the seat on the other side of her. “Cathy,” he said, “do you know Jordie Dunn?” They had decided not to tell her that Dunn was dead, or that she was going to have to stay here, secluded, until the case was wrapped up. There was no point in upsetting her any further.

  “Yes. Jordie worked for Henry. Sometimes.”

  “Did they know each other well? Would Jordie have shared confidences with Henry? Were they friends?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So they didn’t know each other socially then?”

  “Maybe they saw each other at the bar, or a party or something. I just don’t know.”

  “And Jordie didn’t come up at all in conversation in the few weeks before …”

  “No, I told you no.” She pushed her chair back and stood. “I want to lie down.”

  They let her go back into the cottage. Ursula Greene was there, and she put an arm around Cathy. These were small-town graces, and Hazel was glad that the community had come together to support Cathy in her hour of need. But they were in their hour as well, and no help was coming. René Arsenault could go back to those dreaded rooms any time he wanted to now, but the phantom shooter on the roof of the Forty Winks Motel in Kehoe Glenn suggested that more eyes were on them than they strictly wanted.

  “What if whoever killed Jordie Dunn is trying to keep our attention while they deal with their missing person on their own?” Hazel asked him in the car. “Clean up their own mess and keep an eye on us at the same time?”

  “You must have been seen going into the Lorris Arms. They waited until you came out.”

  “It would have been hard to shoot Jordie in his apartment.”

  “But not hard to take a shot at him when he got back, or at you when you went in.”

  “Maybe not.” They angled out onto the highway that led back to Port Dundas. “So they wanted us both, is what you’re saying.”

  “Or him. And they just wanted to send you a message. Stay away.”

  “I wish them luck with that,” she said.

  They drove in silence for a while, each lost in their own thoughts. Then Wingate said, “Do you think it’s possible they know who I am?”

  “How?” she asked. “You haven’t been down to the reserve on official business once since you came to Westmuir. Nobody knows you down there. But if you think you’ve been compromised …”

  “No,” he said.

  “We can work another angle if you want. We just raid the place. Go in hot.”

  “Those girls in there die if you do that.”

  “Maybe not. And you don’t.”

  “This can’t wait,” he said. “You have to send me back in tonight. Before they decide it’s time to cover their tracks.”

  “Let me think about it,” she said.

  Wingate buzzed through on the radio just as they were pulling in. Howard Spere was waiting for them in the Port Dundas station house. He put his hand on Hazel’s shoulder as she came into what was still, apparently, her office. “I’m sorry to hear about your mother,” he said.

  “Thank you, Howard. What have you got?”

  “A leap forward. We stuck sparrow.info into a browser and got nowhere, so then Austin Franks – do you know Austin?”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure.”

  “You’d like Austin. He’s a nice young guy. There’s word that Willan might be moving him to the new HQ.”

  “Keep going, Howard.”

  “Anyway, Austin’s got a good head. He tried a bunch of things: ‘sparrow’ in French, in German, in Polish … nothing. Then he asked some local birding association what kind of sparrow was on the chip.”

  “It’s a house sparrow.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “I know what a house sparrow looks like. Don’t you know what a house sparrow is? James?”

  “I know what a house sparrow is.”

  “Fine,” said Spere. “It was a house sparrow. So Austin looks at the Latin name. Passer domesticus. He puts that into a browser, and …”

  He was done talking, and Hazel spun quickly to her desk. Wingate and Spere stood behind her, watching. She typed in passerdomesticus.info. The screen went blank, and then the image that had been on the casino chip faded up on the screen. Superimposed on it was a simple two-item toggle:

  Ο Male

  Ο Female

  She looked behind herself and Spere made a gesture with his hand that said carry on. She clicked the second choice. The next screen said:

  Please create an email account

  in the name of

  Fiona Emery

  at hushmail.com.

  Click here when you are done.

  She slid her chair away. “Do it,” she said to Spere, and he leaned forward and hurriedly began typing in another window, one that had already been set up to take the name. In a matter of a minute, she was in th
e brand-new mailbox for Fiona Emery. There were two emails: one from Hushmail, welcoming her, another from Donnotreply@passerdomesticus.info.

  Pick up your membership card from member services after 3pm today. Deactivate your hushmail account now.

  “Jesus,” Hazel said. “That’s it. Now the question is, how do you get an invite?”

  “If someone goes down there this afternoon …,” said Wingate.

  “There should be an ID waiting to be picked up by a woman giving her name as Fiona Emery.”

  She sent Wingate to fetch Ray Greene. He came into her office and closed the door. Hazel explained what they’d found to him. He came around the other side of the desk and looked at the browser windows that were open.

  “Wow. That’s a hell of an operation,” he said. “We better send Bail or Jenner down to get that ID.”

  “Well, I can’t go in there again,” Hazel said.

  “But you can send René Arsenault back into Sparrow’s,” Greene said.

  Wingate nodded. “I can get in.” Hazel looked at him. “There are two girls in there.”

  “But you need money.”

  “Fifty-four hundred.”

  “I’ll clear it with Willan. When we get the false IDs at the Five Nations, we’ll authenticate that it’s the same production as the others, and then we’ll shut it down.”

  “The whole casino?”

  “Until we have everyone who’s on the inside there, yes. When it’s locked down, we’ll bust the operation on Ninth Line. With you inside, we can communicate the timing of the bust.”

  “I had no reception down there.”

  “Can the signal be boosted, Howard?”

  “I think so,” said Spere.

  “And what about Commander LeJeune?” Hazel asked.

  “What about her?” Greene said.

  She smiled at him. She couldn’t help it.

  ] 28 [

  Afternoon