Lion's Head Revisited

by Jeffrey Round

  He pulled up to the curb. Without the licence number he couldn’t be sure, but it was definitely the same model. He looked over the house. Curtains pulled open, a few daisies in the beds. Quiet, solidity. It was the home of someone who was confident she wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. Or perhaps never worried she would be looked for.

  Dan parked a few doors down then got out and walked back. From a distance, he noted the flyers bulging in the mailbox. Through the living room window he saw a large plump sofa with a paisley pattern pushed against a beige wall. A bookshelf was crammed with photos and knick-knacks. The sort of things normal people filled their shelves with every day.

  It was all so ordinary.

  He followed a paved walk around back where a wire fence enclosed a tidy yard. No dogs, voiceless or otherwise. He lifted the latch and let himself in. Grass, daylilies, a few shrubs out of season. A white blouse fluttered on a clothesline. No nosy neighbours peering at him over the fence or from behind the curtains.

  He tried the door, but the handle resisted his pressure. Pressing his face against the glass, he made out a mop handle and a bucket with a few cleaning products on the inside steps. Suburbanites obsessed with cleanliness. All those television commercials. He let himself back through the gate then closed it and headed to the front.

  He paused in the drive, doing a slow three-sixty. The neighbourhood was deserted. It felt peculiar. No dogs, no kids, no cars. It could have been the opening of a post-apocalypse film. Millions of deaths, no survivors, one lone visitor stumbling into town. In which case he might need to grab Ked and make a beeline for the Bruce. Isn’t that what Tom Cruise would do? Only there’d be a girl in a T-shirt and cut-off jeans, feisty but in need of rescue, and Tom’s uncommon good sense. She’d distrust him at first, until he saved her from her own recklessness, followed by a kiss, the beginnings of love. La-ti-da. It would all work out in the end, apart from the annihilation of most of the world. It occurred to him he’d better warn Nick before heading out of town.

  He climbed to the front porch. Cracks had formed along the foundation, weeds growing up around the steps. A slip-up in the neighbourhood’s immaculate façade. Black iron fronted the stoop. Curlicue, ornate. The overhead light was still on. He opened the mailbox and leafed through the flyers. Pizza parlours, roofers, no-job-too-small construction firms. But no letters. Nothing to identify the owner.

  He pulled on the screen. The inside door was a wood affair painted in fake wood grain, as though the original had needed improvement. An irregular pattern of tinted windows formed a luminous gold shield when you stepped back to catch the light shining through. A security company sticker peeled away alongside the plastic weather stripping.

  He knocked. No answer, no sound from inside.

  The sun made an irregular pattern on the stoop, undulating shadows imprinted where it shone through the railing. A robin flitted down to the railing, cocked its head at him then took off again. Two plastic deck chairs were centred beneath the window, an overflowing ashtray on the arm of one of them. A red plastic lighter lay beneath. Dan leaned down, grabbed it, and held it to the light. The fluid tilted back and forth, flaming up on the first try. He released the starter and the flame whooshed back inside. For a moment, he was transported back to the fire pit outside the cottage in the Bruce. More memories of his father. The unquiet dead.

  Dan pictured him going up and down the mine shaft every day for years, the toil wearing away at his soul, making him mean and hateful. He tried to imagine him as a young man, his hopes and aspirations, before fatherhood weighed him down. You could quit a job and get a new one, move from one city to another, divorce a spouse and remarry, but fatherhood never really went away. Was that what had turned him into an angry man? Once a father, always a father, with its burden of responsibility.

  He was headed back down the steps when a screen door yawned open one porch over. A woman in a flowery blue dress peered out.

  “How is she today?” she asked.

  “She’s not answering.”

  “That’s not like her. I brought her over some soup yesterday and she didn’t call to say she’d enjoyed it. Frankly, it doesn’t sound good, does it?”

  “Not really.”

  The woman shrugged. “Still, the doctors say she has a good chance if she follows the regimen.” She made sympathetic noises. “You’re one of the nephews. Jack? John?”

  “John.”

  “Well, John, I have the key. Why don’t we just take a look?” Without waiting for an answer, she bustled off inside, returning a moment later.

  Dan watched her huff down her walkway and cross the lawn.

  “I’m Carole Dawson,” she said, huffing and puffing up the steps. “You must’ve heard your aunt talk about me.”

  “Many times.”

  “We go back a long way.” She put the key in the lock and turned the handle. The door swung open. “Hello? Theda?”

  She turned and looked at him. “Was she expecting you? I mean, her car’s in the drive.”

  “No, she wasn’t expecting me,” Dan said. “I was just passing by.”

  She poked her head inside and called again. “Theda? It’s Carole. Your nephew John’s here with me.”

  She turned to him with a concerned look. “You don’t suppose anything’s happened to her?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Why don’t you wait here? I’ll just go tap on her bedroom door.”

  Dan nodded. “Good idea.”

  He heard her timid knocking, followed by more calling. The sound stopped and he heard her give a little gasp.

  She was on her way back out as Dan went in. She shook her head. “Don’t go in there. We’d better call someone.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “It’s most unpleasant.” She put a hand to her forehead. “I’m afraid your aunt is dead.”

  It took Dan only a moment to corroborate that fact. Standing in the bedroom doorway he called 911 then turned to Carole. “What’s the address here?”

  “Nineteen Westonia Crescent.”

  “What’s Theda’s last name?”

  She looked at him as though he might be deranged. “Your aunt’s last name is McPhail. How ever could you forget that?”

  “It’s McPhail,” he repeated to the operator. “Theda McPhail. Yes — police and an ambulance.”

  Carole watched him incredulously as he looked around the room, stepping over the body to examine the window frame.

  His next call was to Nick. He gave the address. “A woman named Theda McPhail. I’m with her neighbour. She found her.”

  Carole’s eyes threw daggers at him. “You don’t even know her,” she said.

  Dan turned back to the body. “Looks like a strangling,” he said into the phone. “There are red marks around her neck. Nylon by the looks of the abrasion. No obvious signs of forced entry, but let me know what you find out.” He imagined Nick turning apoplectic at the request. “Please.”

  Dan directed Carole to sit in one of the chairs. A siren could be heard in the distance.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “Just a friend,” Dan said to reassure her.

  When the police came, he gave his statement. Then he directed them to Carole. She was trying hard to convince anyone who would listen that nothing like this had ever happened in her neighbourhood before.

  Dan looked quickly around the house then came back over to where Carole sat, stunned. Someone had placed an orange emergency blanket around her shoulders.

  “It was so strange,” she said, regarding him with a bewildered expression. “Just a few nights ago. I thought she said a telegram. A telegram for death.”

  Dan cocked his head and listened.

  “But it wasn’t a telegram.” She smiled sadly. “She was on the porch with a newspaper in her lap. She’d been doing the puzzles. She held it up and flapped it around. ‘It’s my name,’ she said. ‘Theda is an anagram. An anagram for death.’ Then she laughed.”

 
Dan took his leave as Carole pondered the mysteries of fate and linguistic puzzles.

  He looked around the kitchen. Janice ran a hand through her hair. They were alone. The cat had hissed on his arrival then vanished. Janice had on a white collared shirt and black jeans. A tattooed claw crept out from under her sleeve. With her flat chest and short hair she might have been a teenage gang member.

  “Her name was Theda McPhail,” Dan said. “Does that mean anything?”

  “No, nothing.”

  At first she’d been angry when she opened the door. Now she looked frightened.

  “I showed Sarah Nealon the picture you sent me. I asked her if it was someone she knew, but she said no. Still, it might have been.”

  “But what would it prove?”

  “I don’t know. You said she called you Kathy when she came by.”

  Her blue eyes flashed. “Yes. She called me Kathy. I told you, Katharine is my real name. But how could she have known that? I just assumed she had the wrong person.”

  “Do you know anyone else who goes by that name?”

  She shrugged. “When we moved here the neighbour next door was a Kate. She moved about a year ago.”

  “Is it possible she confused you with her?”

  “Not unless she didn’t know her well. She was a redhead. Older than me. About forty.”

  “Did she have any kids?”

  Janice nodded. “Yes, an eight-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy.” The frightened expression returned to her face. “Are you thinking they thought Jeremy was someone else’s child?”

  Dan shook his head. “They phoned you for the ransom. Presumably they knew who they were calling. Otherwise someone else would have got the call and you’d never have heard about it.”

  A drawing book lay on the table. Dan turned the cover and flipped through it.

  “It’s Jeremy’s,” Janice said. “He draws in it to calm himself.”

  Something that might have been the mouth of a cave loomed, dark and heavy under scrawls of black crayon, and what might have been stalactites or even long, sharp teeth. He hadn’t seen any stalactites in the caves he’d explored. On the next page was a bear-like figure beside a face without eyes. Demons or kidnappers? Or maybe both.

  “Did Jeremy have this book with him while he was missing?”

  “Yes. It was in his knapsack. Why?”

  “Just wondering. It would have helped keep him calm while the kidnappers had him.” Dan closed the book. “Did Eli say anything to you about having paid back the money he owed Elroy James?”

  The question startled her. “What? No! When did he say that?”

  “Eli didn’t. Elroy did.”

  “I don’t know how he could,” she said at last. “Especially not now. We have nothing.”

  “Where is Eli, by the way? He didn’t return my call yesterday.”

  “He and Ashley took Jeremy out to buy some ice cream. So he can start to feel normal again. So all of us can, if that’s even possible. We need to start acting like a family again. I’ll tell him you asked.”

  Dan sat in his car outside the Bentham home, the windows rolled up against the heat and the air conditioner blasting. He had Nick on the phone again.

  “Retired school teacher,” Nick said before Dan could say anything. “Just retired, in fact. Sixty-five. Lived in the neighbourhood for more than thirty years. Nothing suspicious in the background. Impeccable record. No charges, nothing.”

  A small boy went by on a tricycle, wearing a pirate’s cap and brandishing a plastic sword. Off to plunder the world.

  “Money problems?” Dan asked.

  “No, I just told you,” Nick said, exasperated. “Nothing. She was the least likely person to kidnap someone, except for maybe you. Though I’m having my doubts about you these days.”

  “Any possibility she might have been the mother of Ashley Lake, or related to Sarah Nealon somehow?”

  “Never married. Nobody’s mother unless she gave the kid up for adoption. No obvious link to Sarah Nealon. What did your client say?”

  “Not a clue who she was. Janice, I mean. Unless she’s lying, which I wouldn’t put past her.”

  “From the sounds of it, I’d say you’ve got unreliable clients. Not to mention way too many suspects.” Nick paused. “But, oh yeah, you don’t believe in suspects. You just have leads. So maybe you haven’t focused on the right one yet.”

  The boy on the tricycle returned, his hat askew, one arm held in check by an angry-looking woman as he loudly voiced his objections at being manhandled. The life of a pirate. But Mother was unswayed as she led him back up the drive.

  “I’m glad you said that,” Dan said. “Because, in fact, I do have another lead. So you’ll have to excuse me for abandoning you again while I head back up to the Bruce Peninsula.”

  Nick’s sigh spoke volumes. “You’re going back there?”

  “I know a strawberry farmer with a strange knowledge of biblical passages who I would dearly love to talk to again.”

  “Oh, right. The one without a phone.”

  “Wi-Fi. It strikes me he might know a thing or two about boats as well.”

  “You want to show him the photos?”

  “Thought I might. Any problem with that?”

  “Is he cute? ’Cause I may have a problem with all these overnight excursions you keep making.”

  Dan rolled his eyes. “Is Grumpy the Dwarf cute?”

  “All right. You can go.”

  The boy and his mother vanished inside the house, the tricycle left abandoned on the drive.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Last Rites

  HE’D TAKE THE DRIVE SLOW THIS TIME. It wasn’t as if anyone’s life depended on it. Or so he hoped. He hadn’t called ahead for a motel room either. He’d have to wing it. All his friends had data on their phones and could locate anything anywhere. Dan had struggled with it briefly then given up. He wasn’t married to technology, and he hoped he’d be retired before that day came.

  It was late afternoon. The outer-borough traffic had started. Like carrion, they swooped in each morning to pick at the city’s carcass then turned around and left again each evening. You could hear a horn here and there as someone crept up to make an illegal pass on the right in lanes already clogged with vehicles, impatient to gain an extra car length, but for all they tried there was no use fighting it. One day there would be no more cars, he reminded himself. That day hadn’t come yet either. Pity.

  It was nearly six by the time he made it out of the city. The scenery was as unexceptional as ever. Unless you found yourself looking down from a helicopter, of course. One day Dan would convince Nick to go camping with him in the Bruce. Maybe not to Lion’s Head, though. That was too fraught with memories. Cape Croker, possibly. Live in the wild for a week to remind them how easy they had it in Toronto.

  He’d softened since Nick came into his life and he wondered if it showed. On the other hand, he had to acknowledge that he’d changed for the better. The anxiety and the ongoing nightmares were less pronounced. Was that all it took to dispel PTSD? Someone to hold his hand and say everything was going to be all right? Put that in a bottle and sell it.

  Before Nick, there had been others to keep the ghosts of loneliness and depression at bay. Some good sex too, though the relationships seldom went to a deeper place of belonging. A place where he felt anchored and accepted, flaws and all.

  They’d both had battles with alcohol. Dan’s ended the day he saw the effect it was having on Ked. A teenage boy needed to depend on his father, not worry about him. He had let Ked down again and again until he saw the writing on the wall: he was turning into his own father, a man he’d despised most of his life. There was no one he wanted to be less like. And so he stopped.

  Nick’s drinking, on the other hand, had begun in earnest with the death of his son and the dissolution of a marriage. Ten years down the road he’d started to wonder whether his job was next on the list of things he would soon be leaving behind.
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  The turning point came through yet another child, one he never met. He’d ended up on a park bench one night when he was too drunk to make it home. Ironic, he said, considering all the times he’d kicked someone else off a bench. Only now it was him. In the morning, he woke to find a lunch pail by his head. Inside it was a sandwich and a note — Julian loves you — scribbled in magic marker. He’d cried to think a child had done that for him. He’d cried again telling Dan the story.

  Dan had nearly reached the peninsula when the sky darkened. Fog was crowding in from the sides of the road as he stopped at a gas station outside Chatsworth. A single street lamp lit up the place. There was no one in sight. It felt like the loneliest place in the world. He stepped from the car and unscrewed the gas cap. The escalating numbers on the pump blurred as fatigue hit him. He’d been going at it hard, but something wouldn’t let him quit yet.

  He got back in the car and checked himself in the mirror. His stark features made him look like a prisoner in a detention centre. He pulled back onto the road. Headlights picked out more fog ahead, lapping at it like a giant yellow tongue. You need to learn how to trust, to let someone else be your strength, Nick had told him. That someone is me. But if he let Nick be his strength and then Nick left him, what then?

  Some days he worried Nick had stolen his self-reliance, his ability to be alone and content. Trusting someone was all well and good, but relationships were chance things, the element of doubt always inherent in them. I have my doubts. Beyond a reasonable doubt. Was there ever any doubt? How could trust ever win out? Doubt was like sin. It was everywhere. Sins of omission. Sins of the father. Easy as sin. Beside it, trust never had a chance. Don’t take that away from the boy too, Dan’s Aunt Marge had warned her wayward brother years ago. He’s already lost his mother. What else has he got left? You’re no good to him.

  It came out of the fog. The first sign was a flash of tawny hide, followed immediately by the bump and heart-stopping crunch of bone as something flew at him and slid over the windshield. The sound jolted him out of his skin. He braked hard, sending the car into a skid, barely managing to keep it from skating off the shoulder.