The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2

by Douglas Kennedy

  In the same article, his then-employer, Dwane Poole, was quoted as saying that “ ‘George MacIntyre was about the most talented guy with a lathe and a piece of wood that I’d ever come across,’ ” but that he could turn ugly when crossed.

  I read on, finding every published word I could about the case, printing over fifty pages of material, filling my notebook with names and places and dates and phrases that I was certain were pertinent to the case. By the time I got home it was late afternoon. I did something I had never done before: I plugged the television antenna cable into the wall socket and actually watched the news. The Ivy MacIntyre disappearance was the first item. A CBC reporter was standing outside the “Criminal Investigation Unit of the RCMP in Calgary where George MacIntyre is still being questioned . . .” but he had little else to say about the progress of the investigation.

  But when I woke from a profoundly deep sleep at seven the next morning, there was a bombshell lead item on the CBC Radio news.

  “A formal arraignment of Ivy’s father, George, on charges of her abduction is scheduled to be brought today.”

  Did this mean that the bloody undergarment had been found? And if so, did it prove conclusively that the blood was Ivy MacIntyre’s? And did the technicians also find DNA traces of her father on the same garment? And was his born-again wife really the saint she was being portrayed as? And was I the only damn person in the province of Alberta who saw the look on George MacIntyre’s face as he was being led off to jail and knew: the guy didn’t do it?

  Questions, questions . . . and why wasn’t anybody posing them?

  So, as soon as the news item was finished I made a decision: I was going to call in sick for the next two days . . . during which time I was going to crack this case. Crack it wide open.

  As I decided this, another thought came to me: You are seriously unhinged.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  MRS. WOODS WAS far too understanding about my ongoing “gastric flu.”

  “I gather it’s a horrible dose,” she said, “and you really must look after yourself.”

  “I feel bad about not being there,” I lied.

  “Don’t be,” she said. “Illness is illness. Anyway, this is the first time all year you’ve ever been sick and you’re always putting in extra hours and working weekends. Take the rest of the week off—and do get better.”

  I actually felt fine. Maybe it was the restorative night’s sleep that always follows a hangover. Or maybe it was a strange sense of direction. Ever since I had made the proper acquaintance of the Ivy MacIntyre case, some switch had clicked in my brain. It wasn’t the switch that suddenly erased all memory, all pain. No, this was a mechanism that simply pushed me deeper and deeper into the bizarre narration that was this case. It was like losing yourself in a movie, yet one in which I had no idea whatsoever what the ending would be . . . if, that is, there was even to be an ending.

  Still . . . to work.

  I called Avis and arranged to pick up in a couple of hours. Then I used my cell phone and called Information for Townsend, Alberta. I was in luck. All the numbers I sought were listed—with the exception of that for George and Brenda MacIntyre, which (according to the operator) had recently been changed to unlisted. I then began to make a series of calls, starting with Dwane Poole. He was a soft-spoken man with what I sensed was a natural graciousness. I explained that I was Nancy Lloyd (a name I simply made up), a reporter with the Vancouver Sun, and that I was coming to Townsend that afternoon and was wondering if I could have a half hour of his time.

  “I kind of feel talked out about all this,” he said.

  “I can appreciate that,” I said, “but I have serious doubts about the ‘rush to judgment’ element in this case. I think George MacIntyre is being hanged, drawn, and quartered before all the evidence is in.”

  “I thought that too,” he said, “until that piece of clothing was found in his shop. Now everyone’s saying that the DNA and blood match up . . .”

  “Would two thirty p.m. be OK?”

  “I guess so,” he said, sounding reluctant but not wanting to come across as impolite.

  I then called the Rev. Larry Coursen and got his answering machine. So I left a message, telling him that Nancy Lloyd from the Vancouver Sun called, and might he be around today or tomorrow for an interview? Of course I knew I was taking a risk by giving him the name of the paper. If he was conscientious about such things, he could easily call them and discover he was dealing with a fraud. But I was banking on the fact that he had been so besieged by requests from the media that he would simply accept this one on face value . . . especially as I had also gone to the precaution of making certain that Coursen had yet to be interviewed by anyone from the Sun.

  I rang the school where Ivy MacIntyre was a student and asked to speak to the principal. When I explained who I was, I was put on to a deputy named Mrs. Missy Schulder. She told me that the school had made a decision not to engage in any interviews with the press.

  “We have nothing to say about this,” she told me.

  “Did you yourself know Ivy?” I asked.

  “Of course I know Ivy,” she said. “I was her homeroom teacher for two years. Nice girl. Liked the dad too—even if he did have his angry side.”

  “But did he ever turn that anger against his daughter?”

  “What you trying to get me to say here?” she asked.

  “Nothing, ma’am . . . and this is totally off the record.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “Well, totally off the record between us: I don’t think he did it.”

  “And what makes you say that, Ms. . . . ?”

  “Lloyd. Nancy Lloyd. And the reason I’m saying that is because I know damn well a guilty man wouldn’t keep a bloodstained article of clothing around his workshop.”

  “I’m with you there,” she said in a low, excited hush. “Let me tell you something else, Ms. Lloyd. I never liked the wife. And ever since she got religion . . . well, ‘insufferable’ is about the mildest word I can use to describe her. George may have been from a low-rent background, and he may have had a lot of ‘anger issues,’ and also never got on with his boy, Michael . . . who I always thought was a bit of a punk anyway . . .”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He was always hanging with biker types, got into a lot of drugs, gave his dad a lot of lip. George, from what I heard, got real furious with Michael when he discovered he was dealing crystal meth, and Brenda, the wife, defended her ‘poor little victimized boy’ and sent him off to her people. And Michael did get himself straightened out and is driving trucks cross-country. But if I was a journalist nosing around this case, I’d look long and hard at the wife. She was always trailer trash.

  “You know, her mother had done time as a prostitute in Winnipeg—what a place to be a working girl. And she had this father who’d beaten her older brother so senseless after an argument that the kid was in a coma for a week and was never completely right again after that. Her dad did seven years in prison for that little incident.

  “But the big rumor about Brenda, and one that came out of Red Deer—the town where she grew up—is that, at thirteen, she’d fallen pregnant after being raped by her father. The pregnancy was terminated. No charges were ever brought against him. And three years after this, she met George MacIntyre. He was twenty-four—and was driving trucks at this time. He’d made the mistake of eyeing Brenda up in a café in Red Deer frequented by long-distance drivers. They ended up ‘doing it’ in the back of his pickup. And, wouldn’t you know it, she fell pregnant.”

  So George MacIntyre, from a young age, had a habit of picking up women whenever he stopped while driving, and using the sleeping area behind his cab as the romantic spot in which to bed them.

  Now why did he do the right thing by Brenda and marry her—and how did she track him down after she discovered herself with child? According to Missy Schulder, the couple lived in Red Deer for six years, during which time Ivy was also born.
Then MacIntyre lost his job, due to excessive drinking. So the family moved to Townsend where he was offered the chance to apprentice as a carpenter to an old family friend named Dwane Poole. And then things started going really wrong.

  I scribbled all this down as she spewed it forth—and felt that giddy high a real journalist must feel when they bump into the motherload of sources.

  “Can you elaborate a little more on that?” I asked.

  “I actually think I’ve said enough.”

  “One final thing: the other two local girls who went missing . . .”

  “You mean, Hildy Krebs and Mimi Pullinger?”

  I wrote those names down.

  “That’s right,” I said, trying to sound knowledgeable. “Hildy and Mimi.”

  “Well, Hildy disappeared in 2002 and Mimi in 2005. They were both a little older than Ivy when they vanished. Fifteen, sixteen years old. The thing was, they were both the sort of girls who were always landing themselves in deep doo-doo. Hildy got herself up the spout at fourteen and then lost the baby early due to a drug overdose. And Mimi was thrown out of school twice for sniffing glue in the ladies, then ran off for a bit with a biker . . .”

  “Sounds like a quiet little town you have there.”

  “Now don’t go writing anything like that in your paper. Townsend is, by and large, a pretty OK place. Everywhere’s got white trash. We just have white trash that does dumb stuff which lands us all in the papers and has snoopy reporters like you digging for dirt . . . no offense meant, of course.”

  I decided Missy Schulder was pretty damn good news—and someone who probably relished her role as the town cynic.

  “Any chance you might want to meet up with me for a coffee when I’m down in Townsend?”

  “Hell, no,” she said. “I mean, I’ve got to live here, right? And if I’m seen with some Nosey Parker, well, I’ll never hear the end of it, now, will I? But two tips. Since you’re from Vancouver, you might want to ask around the flophouses off East Hastings. Rumor has it that both Hildy and Mimi have gone to ground there. Junkies. And my second ten-cent bit of wisdom of the morning is to repeat what I said to you earlier: follow the wife. She’s the evil one in the story . . . but if you quote me on that . . .”

  “Fear not, it won’t happen,” I told her.

  After the call I went to the local cybercafe and looked up all I could find about Hildy Krebs and Mimi Pullinger. Everything Missy Schulder told me was on the money—all the trouble into which they landed themselves, the idiot boyfriends, the two disappearances three years apart that were not connected at the time, but which had now come back into focus courtesy of Ivy MacIntyre.

  I printed all the material on the two missing girls and wondered if their parents might be amenable to a visit by a fraudulent Vancouver Sun journalist. Then I googled everything I could find on Michael MacIntyre. Nothing of interest. But even if he was legally allowed to come out and say that, as much as he hated his father, George couldn’t harm his daughter . . . well, would that change anything? Of course not. In a case like this, everyone was so wrapped up in the need for closure—for finding the bogeyman and seeing him punished—that they were willing to construct a narrative that served their purposes. And this narrative essentially revolved around the idea that George MacIntyre was the killer among them.

  On the way south to Townsend, the local Calgary CBC station talked about the investigation that was continuing both in Calgary—where Mr. MacIntyre was still being held—and in Townsend. No doubt a team of RCMP forensic specialists were now inspecting every fiber in every corner of George’s workshop.

  Yes, go ahead and microexamine every damn corner of it. And while you’re at it, why not follow the advice of Missy Schulder—someone who actually knows the human territory here—and cherchez la femme.

  That is certainly what I was planning to do if Brenda MacIntyre would see me.

  The road south edged its way through Calgary’s endless urban sprawl. Then, suddenly, it all fell away and I was in open country. Though part of me wanted to look up and see what exactly I was passing through, I knew that this could be, at the very least, unsettling . . . especially after the business with Vern the other day. But it’s amazing how you can limit your peripheral vision when necessary and simply focus your eyes on the roll of the asphalt in front of you.

  I did finally look up when I got to Townsend. It was a blink-twice-you-miss-it sort of place: a gasoline alley with the requisite monocultural crap (Tim Hortons, an outpost of the Red Lobster, a Burger King), augmented by a short Main Street of undistinguished concrete buildings and one or two red-brick holdovers from the 1950s. There was a bank. There was a supermarket. There was a shop that sold outdoor stuff. There was an old-style mom-and-pop restaurant. There was a sad-looking used bookstore, largely specializing in blockbuster paperbacks (but still, it was a bookstore). There was a bar. I thought about doing that old reporter thing of going into the local saloon and trying to strike up a conversation with the proprietor, in the hopes of eliciting some insights or useful information. But small towns have their own internal bush telegraphs and I didn’t want word to get out too fast about my being here. Best to not announce myself to the world.

  Dwane Poole lived on a side street not far from the ugly breezeblock high school that Ivy attended. His was a simple ranch house on a half acre lot, with an extended detached garage taking up most of the available garden space. I heard the whirr of a rotary saw from the garage, so I approached its door. It was open. Poole was inside, wearing clear goggles as he fed a large piece of finished timber into the circular saw. He pushed the wood through, cutting it cleanly, then looked up and saw me.

  “You Nancy?” he asked, whipping off his goggles. He was a thin, diminutive man in his late fifties, wearing a wool check shirt, baggy jeans, and round wire-rimmed glasses. I could easily imagine him, thirty years earlier, passing the bong around a crash pad while wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt. Now he came across as quiet, reserved, with a strong streak of shyness. His workshop was a masterpiece of organization: all the tools immaculately arranged, stacks of finished cabinets on one wall (the craftsmanship was impressive), drawings, design plans, and a large wooden desk filling another wall. Behind the desk was a picture of Dwane with a young man attired in the uniform of the Canadian Armed Forces.

  “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,” I said, accepting his outstretched hand.

  “You’re about the fifth journalist who’s beaten a path to this door,” he said.

  “I won’t take up too much of your time.”

  He moved toward his office area, where there was a drip machine of coffee brewing.

  “You’re in luck,” he said. “I just made a fresh pot.”

  “Is that your son?” I asked, pointing to the photograph I had spied moments earlier.

  “Yes, that’s David. He’s out in Afghanistan now. Stationed with the Canadian NATO Forces near Kandahar.”

  “That must be a source of pride and worry,” I said, trying to choose my words carefully.

  “More of the latter,” he said. “I don’t really know what we’re doing over there. But I’m not a politician and my boy did sign up for a tour of duty, so I suppose he has to accept the risks that come with the job.”

  He poured me a mug of coffee and motioned for me to sit down on a simple wooden stool opposite his desk. I pulled out my notebook and pen. He himself perched on the edge of the desk and, from the outset, looked like he regretted agreeing to this interview in the first place.

  “You know, George might have been the most talented carpenter I’d ever seen. When I was apprenticing—around forty years ago—every skill was hard-won and I really had to work at getting the principals down right. But George walked into this workshop and, within an hour, he was using a lathe as if he was born to it. And his eye when it came to understanding the intricacies of how to cut against the grain . . . like I said, he was a total natural.”

  “Did he talk much about the problems he
had at home?”

  “For the first six months he was all business when he came through that door. He was here to learn a craft, a trade—and he was very determined. He was also, at this point, on benefit—but the provincial government was also paying him what’s called a Skills Re-Training stipend to work with me. It wasn’t much—around two hundred dollars a week—and I sensed money was very tight at home, especially as the wife wasn’t yet working. But, as I said, he kept a tight rein of all that—until he came in one morning with a gash over one eye. I asked him what had happened. He told me Brenda had been drunk and got into a real bad fight with Ivy, roaring at the girl and slapping her across the face. When George tried to pull Ivy away Brenda grabbed an iron and caught him right above the eye. He had to drive himself to a local hospital, get five stitches, and—this was a big mistake—cover for Brenda by telling the doctor on duty that he’d gotten the gash in a bar fight. That went on his medical records—and was used against him after Brenda’s arrest, especially as there was another incident when she punched him in the nose and broke it. Again he told the doctors that it was a drunken brawl—and these two recorded ‘bar brawls’ have ended up now as further evidence that he has a violent temper.”

  “You say, ‘further evidence.’ Were there other violent incidents besides those two?”

  “It’s a fact that he did punch her once in the stomach—but, according to George, that was only after she had pulled his hair and tried to throw a pot of boiling water on him, which he dodged just in time. Anyway, after throwing the punch, she doubled over and hit her head on a kitchen counter. Ivy came running into the room and saw her mother concussed, so she ran into her room, locked the door, and dialed 911. The police came and arrested her dad.”

  “But didn’t he explain to them what had happened?”

  “Brenda also had her side of the story—how he’d gotten furious with her for being such a bad housekeeper and slugged her.”