“Are you enjoying him?” she asked as if speaking of a new car or a Rolex watch.
“I am,” I told her.
“Good.”
“There seem to be some absences tonight,” I observed, following a healthy swig of champers. “Errall? Anthony and Jared? What time are they arriving? Are they perfecting the grand late entrance?”
“I’m afraid not,” Sereena said lightly.
What? I sensed something more to this. Not only were Sereena’s parties not to be missed, but Anthony and Jared were intimately involved with this same charity, and Errall had told me herself that she would be here. What gave? I regarded my companion. Sereena is not a gossip. I knew I’d have to press to get more out of her. So I did.
“Errall and her latest are…having discussions,” Sereena stated, “and called to give their regrets. Anthony and Jared, well, they’re simply not here.”
This was unsatisfactory. “Discussions” is Sereena-talk for a battle royal. And I knew Anthony and Jared would never simply not show up. Their reputations in all social circles as gentlemen of impeccable manners would not allow it. There had to be more to it. “Did you speak to them?” I inquired.
Sereena made a show of pulling away from the balustrade and headed for the French doors, pulling them open with a flourish à la Joan Crawford. She tossed a smouldering look at me over her ermine-clad shoulder and declared, “I speak with guests, not no-shows.” And in she went, quickly swallowed up by swarms of ardent admirers.
I detected a slight slur in her voice when I answered the phone. “Errall, can you slow down and tell me exactly what’s wrong?” Was she drunk or just half-asleep? I knew which one I was as I stole a glance at the bedside clock. It was after three-frigging-a.m!
“There is someone outside my house!” she bellowed. “Is that clear enough for you?”
Ah, sweet, gentle Errall.
“Where’s Nicole?” Sereena had told me the reason Errall hadn’t been at the party was because Errall and her latest girlfriend were at home, having a fight.
“Yvonne.”
“Oh. What happened to Nicole?”
“There is someone outside my house, you idiot!”
My brain was now fully awake and vibrating with the sound of Errall’s unhappy voice. “Are you sure? Are you alone? Have you called the police?” I was alarmed but trying to keep my voice low so as not to wake the other inhabitants of my bedroom, namely one man and two dogs.
“Yes, yes, and I’m calling you, aren’t I?”
“Errall, call the police,” I ordered, now taking this as seriously as I would have from the start, if it wasn’t for all the champagne I’d consumed at Sereena’s party, followed by some rather exhausting undercover maneuvers with my boyfriend.
“Really?” She sounded uncertain. Not a trait commonly exhibited by the normally dogmatic Errall Strane. “But, but….”
“Errall, if you think there is someone out there, call now! I’ll be right there.”
“Okay.”
She hung up before either of us could say anymore. Had I just agreed to go over there? I lolled my head to the right to see if the ringing phone and muffled conversation had woken Alex. But who was I kidding? The guy was a security expert. Did I really think he’d sleep through this? My eyes landed on his naked bulk, seeming, as it always did (even when he was fast asleep), ready to jump into action.
“Tell me,” he said, his eyes intense. He knew three-a.m. calls often meant bad news. My dogs, snuffling and snoring somewhere on the floor below us, weren’t nearly as intrigued.
“It’s Errall. She thinks there’s someone skulking around outside her house.”
He sat up straighter. “Let’s go.”
I was about to say, “No, dear, you stay here. Go back to bed, and I’ll call you when I know something.” But then again, who did I think we were? Rock Hudson and Doris Day? Alex Canyon was ready to go and in full Rambo-style fatigues, weaponry fully charged, before my bare feet hit the floor.
“Where are the cops?” I asked as Errall let us into the front door of her two-storey house on Pembina Avenue. “Aren’t they here yet?” I couldn’t believe it. It had taken us fifteen minutes to get there from across town, surely the police could have beaten us.
“I didn’t call them.”
Errall was wrapped up tight in a plaid housecoat that was too thin for the time of year, and her hair was a messy pile on top of her head, held there by an incongruously girly banana clip. She was barefoot, and in her slender right hand she held a mug full of dark liquid.
“Why the hell not?”
“Alex,” she greeted the big guy behind me, more as a way of ignoring my questions than in any real gracious-hostess-y way. “You guys want some coffee?”
“What we want is to be curled up together in bed for several uninterrupted hours.” Middle-of-the-night house calls bring out the snarky in me. And so does Errall. “But instead, how about telling us what the heck is going on? And why haven’t you called the cops? I’m gonna keep asking until you tell me, so out with it! And if this is some kind of joke—”
“No joke.” She turned her back to us, leading us into the big kitchen at the back of the house, where we each took a seat around the kitchen island. Errall began pouring coffee for us, regardless of the fact that neither of us wanted any.
“So? Why haven—”
Errall spun around and spat at me, “Okay, okay already!”
I waited. Patiently. Tapping my fingertips on the island counter.
“What if it was her?”
Alex and I exchanged looks but said nothing.
“Yvonne,” she added helpfully. “She and I had a big fight tonight. She stormed out of here.”
Errall had not been finding her re-entry into the world of dating an easy one. Not that that seemed to be stopping her from re-entering it over and over and over again with many, many women of late. But mine is not to question why. Well, actually, that’s not strictly true. “Errall,” I said, trying to sound more sympathetic. “Tell us everything that happened from the beginning.”
“Everything isn’t your business,” she began in her usual obliging way. “But Yvonne and I have been having some problems, I can tell you that. We’ve only been going out for a few weeks, and already she wants to move in. She is such a lesbian! All she wants to do is stay home and watch Claire of the Moon and her DVD collection of The L Word episodes over and over again.”
“And I’d bet she knows someone who knows Jodie Foster, right?” I couldn’t help it.
In the interest of staving off the degradation of the current line of discussion, Alex wisely entered the fray. “What happened after the fight?”
Errall adjusted her sitting position so that she was facing Alex and would have to crane her neck to look at me. “She ran out of here like some fifties movie heroine, and that was it. I drank half a bottle of wine, sulked a bit, and fell into bed.”
“Then you heard something?”
“Yes. It wasn’t very loud or anything, but whatever it was was enough to wake me up. It wasn’t so much a noise as just that sense you get when you know something isn’t the way it should be. Somebody was outside. I just knew it. Of course I didn’t really, I suppose, but I was sure I could hear the soft squish of footsteps outside my bedroom window.”
Ahhhh geeeez.
“I know what you mean,” Alex said.
Uhhhh…what?
“Sounds that aren’t supposed to be there are sometimes louder than they really are,” he said. “Especially sounds around your own home because you know it so well.”
She nodded wildly, at the same time tossing me a frown. “That’s exactly it!”
She was actually smiling at him. Double ah geez.
“So you didn’t really hear anything or see anything?” I handily summarized. And you were drinking, and upset from a lover’s quarrel, I added to myself.
She ignored me some more. “After I talked to Russell…” said as if I weren’t there
“…I was about to call the police, but then I thought, if it’s Yvonne out there, I don’t want to embarrass her, and I knew you guys were coming over, so I decided not to.”
“The police are used to this type of thing, Errall,” Alex said in a soothing voice. “If you ever doubt your safety, you shouldn’t hesitate for a second to call them. That’s why we have them.”
“Do you still think it was her?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I called her.”
“I want you to come home with us,” I said. No matter what it was that had really happened or what Errall thought had happened, her fear was real enough, and no one should be alone at a time like that. Even big meany Errall Strane.
She gave me a strange look and said, “I’m going over to Yvonne’s.”
That works too.
The three of us left the house together, and as we waited for Errall to lock the front door I excused myself, asking Alex to keep watch over Errall. He didn’t ask why. He knew what I was going to do. He’d thought of it himself.
I made my way down the side of the house and entered the woodsy backyard through a latched gate. I didn’t have a flashlight, but the moon was full and filled the area behind Errall’s house with a faint, blue light that reflected off the patina of snow like in a gloomy painting or a Tim Burton movie. I know this yard well, and, unlike my own, there is no second entrance at the rear via a back alley. There is no other way in, except the way I’d just come.
I gingerly stepped forward and peered down at the ground. The snow was undisturbed. Behind me, mine were the only tracks coming into the backyard. No one had been back here tonight. Although normally I would not think of Errall as the type of person to make things up or hear or see things that weren’t really there, tonight that seemed to be the case. She’d been drinking. She’d had a fight with her girlfriend. She’d fallen into an uneasy sleep, and a sound, likely something wholly innocent, had awakened her and spooked her. It happens to the best of us.
Just as I was about to turn back and return to where Alex and Errall were waiting for me, something caught my eye. In the distance, the sheen of moonlight covering the hibernating lawn like a blanket appeared…rumpled. I focused as best I could through the dim light and saw a definite trail, like a slithering snake, cutting through the snow.
Tracks.
I was wrong. There was another way in.
I moved closer, careful not to disturb the evidence.
Indeed there was a trail in the snow, my own track matching it as I followed it first to the back edge of the yard where someone had obviously climbed over the fence and into Errall’s yard, then back toward the house where the footprints stopped. Right beneath Errall’s bedroom window.
Monday, four-thirty a.m., I dropped Alex off at the airport for his stupid six a.m. Northwest Airlines flight to Minneapolis and points beyond. I was back to being a bachelor. I was tired, grumpy, coffee-less, and rather sore from carpet rash and whisker burn that covered an alarming portion of my body. Even though I’d already showered with Alex, I debated going home and cuddling up with Barbra and Brutus (who’d gone back to bed before we even left the house) but instead put on a my-work-is-never-done face and headed for the YWCA for a workout and another shower. I was even grumpier finding out I had to wait until six a.m. for the gym to open.
When I walked into PWC—once known as the Professional Womyn’s Centre—which houses my office along with those of Errall the lawyer, Alberta the psychic, and Beverly the psychologist, the place was still dark. It was too early even for Lilly, our cheery-as-a-robin receptionist. I was hoping Errall might be in (as she often burns the candle at both ends), but her office door was locked tighter than my mother’s change purse. I wanted to ask if she’d had any more unwelcome visitors or ideas about who had been traipsing about her backyard over the weekend. When I’d told her about the tracks I’d found, she was understandably upset and more than a little pissed off that I’d needed them to prove to me she wasn’t hallucinating the whole thing. She’d concluded it was likely some neighbourhood kids on a prank, or a daring burglar who changed his or her mind after seeing the ADT Security sticker on her bedroom window. I hoped she was right.
Although I rarely do it, I love getting to work before daylight, before the clamour of regular business hours begins. I seem to get more done than usual against the backdrop of pitch-black windows and impenetrable silence. And so it was that morning. I had fallen behind on a number of things during my unexpected two-day holiday with my mother and weekend with Alex, but nothing urgent. Until Clara Ridge hired me, I had only had a few small matters I was working on that needed wrapping up: finding a delinquent dad late on child-support payments (he’d moved in with his own mommy and daddy) and surveillance of a pizza delivery guy who was padding the bills in his own form of taxation. I drank coffee and filed stuff and prepared bills and paid bills and went through old stacks of mail and read The StarPhoenix, which had been sitting against the building’s front door when I’d arrived. All-in-all a good day’s work, and done by nine-thirty a.m.
I skipped down the stairs to the front door, tossing the paper at a surprised Lilly as I passed by on my way out. “Top o’ the mornin’ to ye, lass.” (A good detective is always trying out new accents for use in undercover work.)
She gave me her usual wide smile, brimful of happy, not even blinking an eye at my brogue. “You too!” she called after me as I exited.
I decided the best place to start my search for Matthew Ridge would be the place where his parents first lost track of him: his high school. Mount Royal Collegiate is a west-side public school, a typical, institutional-looking building which probably hadn’t appeared much cheerier on ribbon-cutting day. I entered through the front doors and found the hallways echoingly empty, as they should be in the middle of a school day, I suppose. I made my way to the counter of the Support Services area, home to several secretary-types behind computer monitors, but realm of one little Ms. Frances Frey, the school’s chief secretary and keeper of all important information. She was all of four feet tall in shabby heels. She wore a thick, navy sweater over a plain, white blouse, and a skirt that had seen a great deal of duty. Her thin, brown hair was masterfully feathered over her ears and forehead, but the rest just kind of hung there—out of sight, out of mind.
For quite some time I stood at the counter, watching as Ms. Frey, hunched at a desk, typed something into the bowels of her computer, something so vitally imperative to the continued existence of the school (and possibly the world) that she soundly ignored my presence. When it appeared she might finally take a break, disaster averted, I cleared my throat and shifted from one foot to the other, hoping for some attention. I tried a dashing smile, which went resolutely unappreciated.
“I’ll be with you in a moment,” she said as she referred to a pile of correspondence, no doubt time-sensitive missives from the principal and maybe the Prime Minister of Canada.
Glancing at some of the other faces in the room—thinking one of them might offer me assistance—it was wholly apparent by their averted eyes that it was solely Ms. Frey’s job to deal with outsiders. I scoured the pale, blank walls for something to look at and settled on a large, round clock and watched it as the seconds ticked by with irritating regularity. The phone rang, and Frances Frey answered it as if its clangorous ring somehow gave it priority over me and the computer. She talked a bit into the receiver, giving the caller some rather brusque instructions on how to load a photocopier with paper. I hoped, for the sake of the caller, she wouldn’t have to go over there and do it herself.
“Can I help you?” she asked once she’d hung up the phone, her tone imperious and not at all friendly.
“I’d like to inquire about a student.”
She looked at me without voicing her response, which was probably something like, “I’d like to run naked through a raging surf with Tom Cruise, but so what?”
I forged ahead. “He’s an ex-student actually, and I was wondering if there
was any information I could obtain about his time at Mount Royal.”
“Student number?”
“No, I—”
“Name.” Then she added succinctly, assuming my stupidity, “Of the student, not yours.”
“Matthew Ridge.”
“Doesn’t sound familiar,” she murmured as she typed furiously at her keyboard, studying the screen in front of her with laser-like intent. “Was he a student in term one? Before Christmas?”
“Ah, nope, a little longer ago than that.”
She looked up at me with incredulity as if I should have already told her that. Maybe I should have. “Year?”
“Excuse me?” I’d heard her, but something about Ms. Frey made me want to piss her off.
“In what year did Mr. Ridge graduate?”
The phone rang, and she picked it up with one sharp motion, eying me the entire time, her stubby fingers at the ready above the computer’s defenseless keys, the nail of her middle finger vigorously clicking that of her thumb. She began speaking in impatient, clipped tones to the same person with the paperless photocopier problem—God help him or her—and told me with sharp eyes that she still expected an answer from me, for she was quite capable of dealing with more than one irritant at a time.
“He attended school here twenty years ago,” I mouthed the words to her. Let’s see what she makes of that.
She arched a severely plucked eyebrow at me before focusing all her attention on dressing down her caller for their inability to follow simple instructions. When that task was dispensed with, she hung up the phone and scoured me with a particularly abrasive look. Someone really needed to get out of the school system. “Just who are you, sir, and why do you wish to know about a student who attended this school twenty years ago?”
So she could read lips. “My name is Russell Quant, and I’m investigating the disappearance of one of your students, Matthew Ridge, twenty years ago.”
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