“Well, I certainly wasn’t here then,” she told me, as if wanting to clear up any misconception that she could possibly have had any culpability in the misplacement of a student.
I’d play it her way. “As it seems your computer records don’t go back that far, can you tell me if there is anyone currently on staff who might have been here at that time, or maybe you have old paper files?”
“Unless you have a subpoena that instructs me to release that information, I’m afraid that, for you, Mr. Quant, that information will not be forthcoming.”
Subpoena? Oh Kee-rist. I’d gone about this the wrong way. Ms. Frey was not to be bullied or flirted with; she was to be yielded to.
“Of course,” I responded. “I certainly understand, and I admire your diligence in the protection of your students’ information, and I’m sure they appreciate it too. I’ll certainly mention that when I speak with Principal Rudnitsky.” I had noticed one or two things other than the clock while I was waiting, including a staff roster posted to a bulletin board.
I turned to leave when I heard her say, “Mr. Rudnitsky wouldn’t be the one you want to talk to.”
My eyes fell back upon the sovereign queen. “Oh?”
“Mr. Rudnitsky has been here for less than a decade.” Damned outsider! “Mr. Slavins, he’s the PE instructor. He would have been here at the time Mr. Ridge went to school here. And there’s one more thing you might find useful.” She bopped up from her chair (giving her not much more clearance above the reception desk counter than when she was seated) and crossed her empire to a shelving unit, returning seconds later with a thin, bound book about the size of an eight-by-ten picture frame.
“What’s this?”
“The yearbook for the year in question.”
Smart cookie. I was warming to Ms. Frey. “May I have this for a while, Ms. Frey?”
“Absolutely,” she told me as she whipped out a receipt book from a drawer. “That’ll be twenty-four dollars and ninety-five cents.”
After confirming that indeed he’d been a teacher at the school during the era in question, Donald Slavins agreed to meet me in the parking lot at the rear of the school during his morning break.
“Care for a chip?” he asked, holding forth a freshly opened bag of Zesty Nacho tortilla chips.
Yes! “No, thank you,” I said, abstemiously.
The PE teacher was in his fifties sliding fast into sixties, bald as a drag queen’s chest, and near on three hundred pounds. After washing down the last of the zesty triangles with half a can of no-name cola, he reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and withdrew a pack of smokes. I concluded he must teach by the “do as I say, not as I do” method.
“Now what’s this all about? You said you’re doing some research or something?”
“Not exactly,” I said, wishing I’d worn a thicker coat. I had on a grey suede number that looked rocking (according to my menswear-boutique-owning friend Anthony) but did little to keep tentacles of arctic air from slipping through its thin lining to nip at my skin. It wasn’t spring yet. “I’m looking for one of your ex-students, and anything you could tell me about him or where he might have gone after leaving this school would be helpful.”
“Oh,” he replied between deep drags of smoke, not sounding very interested. “Why’s that?”
“Excuse me?”
“Why you looking for this kid? He do something wrong or something?”
“No, not at all. I’ve been hired by his mother. She lost track of him and would like to see him again.”
“Lost track!” he guffawed. “Not much of a mother, is she?”
Rude bugger. I let my eyes do the talking.
“So who’s the kid?” he asked, ignoring my eyes.
“Matthew Ridge.”
“Never heard of him,” he answered, stamping his feet as if the cold had finally made it through his stratum of trans fat, causing him to register the sub-zero temperature.
He was lying to me. I heard the hesitation in his voice, but, thankfully, I had Ms. Frey on my side. I just happened to have the yearbook from Matthew Ridge’s tenth-grade school year. I turned to a page of individual photos, mostly acne-ravaged, gawky-looking boys and heavily made-up girls with hair so big at times it did not entirely fit within the frame of the picture. I pointed to one of the boys, a handsome lad with hair so blond it was almost white and a dimpled smile: the unrefined beginnings of a Hollywood hunk.
“So who’s that?” Slavins asked in a manner that told me why he hadn’t become a drama teacher.
“That would be Matthew Ridge.”
“Yeah? Don’t recognize the kid. Y’know, what year is that? I might have been teaching over at Hardy that year. Moved around a bit in those days, before I ended up here.”
I flipped a few pages to the teachers’ photos and pointed out Mr. Slavins minus twenty years, a hundred pounds, and the disillusioned attitude; it looked good on him.
He lit up a second cigarette. “Oh, yeah, well, there ya go, there I am. Guess I was here that year. Don’t remember the kid though.”
I paged forward to near the back of the yearbook, to the section on sports teams, and indicated a picture of the basketball team. There was Matthew Ridge, and there was Donald Slavins as team coach.
“Yeah, well, he was one kid of twenty; how’s a guy supposed to remember one kid, eh?” he said with a forced chuckle. “Getting old, y’know. Memory is the first to go; that’s what they say, right?”
I turned to the next page. Volleyball: Matthew and Coach Slavins. I regarded the teacher with a questioning eye and doubting look.
Slavins dropped his cigarette into the squishy snow beneath our feet, where it spit its disappointment at being extinguished before its time. The big man stepped close to me and poked a sausage finger into my chest. I reeeeeeeeeally hate when people do that. “I told you I don’t know the kid, didn’t I?”
After a few seconds of him breathing his nacho smoker’s breath at me I guessed he wanted an answer. “That’s what you said,” I admitted, but not without some attitude of my own.
“Well, then, that’s what I meant,” he told me. “And you got no right snooping into this business anyway. His mother wants to see him so much? Misses him? Well maybe she shoulda thought about that twenty years ago? Eh? Right?”
I stood my ground silently.
“I don’t wanna see your face again,” he told—no, warned—me, then turned on his heel and entered the school through a windowless back door.
To the untrained eye, things hadn’t gone so well. But to my way of thinking, they’d gone swell. Mr. PE’s resistance to telling the truth told me one thing: I had a bona fide mystery on my hands.
Chapter 3
By mid-afternoon, I had successfully tracked down two of Matthew Ridge’s high school buddies—from names I’d pulled from sports team rosters in the yearbook—but with little results. Both men certainly remembered their friend, but all they could recall is that he simply never came back to school after tenth grade, and they had no idea what happened to him. I moved on to a third name that I matched to a listing in the Saskatoon phone book: Allan Dartmouth. If it was the same guy, he’d become a massage therapist with his own business, Dartmouth Wellness Clinic, located in a busy strip mall on Circle Drive.
As I searched the mall’s lot for a spot to leave my car, I found myself guessing what Mr. Dartmouth would look like compared to his yearbook photo. I was finding it fascinating to view the impact of time on the people who filled Matthew Ridge’s life twenty years ago. When I first met them—or rather their pictures in a high school yearbook—they were fresh-faced and smiley, anxious to tackle the world, and, if I correctly recalled how the mind of a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old works, ready to party hard and always trying to get laid. Now they were adults in their mid-thirties, deep into careers they either chose or fell into and would likely keep for the rest of their working lives. They had families or wanted none. They had gained weight or lost weight, gained wrinkles, lost hair.
They were either accomplished or, if not by this point, probably never would be. A lot of life is packed into twenty years, and it changes a person. I wondered how it had changed Matthew Ridge. When I found him, what would he be like?
The young man behind the reception desk at Dartmouth Wellness Clinic was a no-nonsense kind of fellow who I guessed was the real control-wielder of the place, running the business with a firm hand and efficient manner. I could tell that nothing slipped by him, except maybe a wee detective?
“Good afternoon, which practitioner do you have an appointment with?” the young man, with a name badge that said Edward on it, asked me three seconds after I’d come through the front doors of the place.
I noted a casually elegant waiting room full of clients as I approached the desk. I debated a lie, telling him I had an appointment and making a scene when he didn’t have it written down, but even I didn’t buy it. Just by looking at the supercilious face of Edward—he’d never, ever, forgotten to write down an appointment (or, for that matter, made any other mistake throughout his entire life—I wondered if he was related to Ms. Frances Frey). This was obviously a thriving business with little chance of downtime, so I went with an alternate lie. “I don’t have an appointment,” I began, “but I’d really like to get in to see Allan—he’s an old school buddy of mine. I can see he’s busy, but I just need a quick rub to sort out a sports injury before tonight’s game. Is there anything at all you can do?”
Edward listened to me intently, taking in all the information and all the implied meanings of every word, and then asked me to take a seat, saying he’d see what he could do. About ten minutes later, he called me up to the desk and said he’d been able to arrange a short consultation and treatment for me in twenty minutes. I thanked him profusely and returned to my seat to further study Matthew’s yearbook, which was becoming as familiar to me as a family photo album.
In exactly twenty minutes, I was called up to the desk by Edward, then led into the inner sanctum of the clinic by a young woman whom he introduced to me as his assistant, Sasha. As we gently floated down the white-walled, white-carpeted halls of Dartmouth Wellness Clinic, I noticed engraved door plaques bestowed each treatment room with a name like Serenity Palace or Peaceful Stirrings. I was told to enter Gentle Rain, doff my clothes, and lie naked on the table, tummy down with a towel over my butt (not in exactly those words).
Two minutes later, there was a knock on the door, so unobtrusive I almost did not hear it.
“Come in,” I called from my prone position on the massage table.
For the next few minutes a faceless stranger who identified himself as Dr. Dartmouth—I guess he got a doctorate in…something?—went about the well-rehearsed machinations of putting me at ease, identifying my massage needs, and gently beginning the treatment by working gently on my back with big hands warmed with heated oil.
“Edward tells me we went to school together,” the massage doctor slipped into the sparse conversation as his magic fingers moved to my lower back. “I don’t recall the name.”
Of course I never attended Mount Royal Collegiate with Allan Dartmouth, but I was counting on the fact that most people don’t remember half the people they went to school with. “Yeah, it’s hard to remember so long ago. Can you believe it’s been almost twenty years since we graduated? I think we were a year apart though. I’m a private investigator now.”
“Really? Isn’t that interesting?” I think so.
“I’m looking into finding one of your classmates.” Dartmouth and Matthew had been on several sports teams together, so I knew they knew each other and were probably friends. “Matthew Ridge.”
I felt a sudden pressure change in the hands kneading my skin.
“Oh, Matthew, yeah.” I felt the words expelled above my bare back, carried on a puff of cooled breath.
Not getting off that easy, buddy. “You were his friend, right?”
He was at my thighs now and pressing hard. “That feel all right?”
“Yes.” It was about then that I realized how exposed I was to this man and that it probably would be in my best interests not to push him too hard if he didn’t want to talk. Why didn’t you just keep your clothes on, Quant? (I’d given myself that particular advice once or twice before.) “You knew Matthew pretty well, right?” I ventured again.
“Yes. He and I knew each other. Why are you looking for him?” He was bending my right leg at the knee, lowered it, and began pulsating the pad of my foot. Hard. “You okay?”
The electrical shivers that were coursing from my toes to a spot right behind my eyeballs were telling me no, but I could tell this guy knew something but was hesitant about spilling it, so I had to stick it out. “Fine, I’m fine. Feels good.”
“Gooooood. I’m glad,” he said in what might have been meant to be a comforting tone, but I was hearing something else, something faintly sinister. Maybe it was my imagination.
“You have any idea what happened to Matthew after grade ten? His mom would like to find him. She hasn’t heard from him since then.”
“He got sent to reform school or something like that, isn’t that right?”
“Yes. Did you spend time with him at all that summer, before he got into trouble?”
“Turn over now, please.”
I did as he said and caught his eye as he began to work on my chest. He looked at me a little too long, judging my intent I guess, before answering. “Not really, no. We were kids though. We got into all sorts of trouble back then. No big deal. I guess Matthew got caught and was sent off.”
“You ever see him after he got back?”
“Absolutely not!”
I stared at him, registering his surprisingly vehement reaction with my eyes.
“I never saw him again,” he quickly added, calmer. “The summer passed; I went back to school; Matthew didn’t, things changed. Our time is done now.” He pulled away, turned to wash his hands at a sink then used a soft, white towel to dry off. “Do you ever see Sally Munroe?” he asked, his back still to me. “Everyone knew her, being class prez and all.”
Trickster. “Sally Munroe was the vice-principal,” I answered back. “Remember?”
He turned slowly and gave me a stiff smile. “You pay at the front.”
This was getting to be an expensive day.
My last call of the day was to St. Paul’s Hospital, on an impoverished, crime-ridden block of 20th Street, where, after dark, security guards with flashlights are available to escort visitors from the front entrance of the hospital to the door of their car. But I was safe; it was mid-March, and the sun wouldn’t drop until close to seven-thirty.
I found a spot for the Mazda on Avenue P and made my way up a hillock, cut through a parking lot, passed by the Emergency entrance, and walked up the sidewalk that followed the semi-circular driveway past a Jesus statue on the centre lawn area to the front vestibule. From making a few phone calls, I knew that Kimberly Enns was a nurse in the Palliative Care Unit. I also knew that she probably had better things to do than talk to me while she was on shift, but at least I could make face-to-face contact and set up another time to talk.
On the fifth floor, I exited the elevator and checked the signs. Surgical Unit to the left, Palliative Care to the right. I passed by a large sitting area meant for patients and their guests, but today it was mostly patients, many in wheelchairs with IV poles at their sides and glum looks on pallid faces. My heart did a little rat-a-tat-tat in my chest. I don’t hate hospitals as many people do, but they are the one place where I seem unable to control my emotions; a whole host of erratic feelings float through my body like unbidden ghosts I’m unaware of until they show themselves and surprise the crap out of me.
I slowed my pace and locked my eyes on the swinging doors that separate the Palliative Care Unit from the non-dying rest of the world. I experienced a pang of sadness at how it must feel to come to this place to visit a loved one whose life is ending, and I was glad that today that was not the case for m
e. I inched open one of the doors and was immediately embraced by the overwhelming solemnity that lives in those halls. The place doesn’t even smell or look like any other part of the hospital; it’s just…different.
On my way to the nurses’ station, I passed a quiet room, a chapel, and a room that looked like everyone’s grandma’s sitting room with flower-patterned couches, doily-covered tables, and a decades-old television set. Everything my eyes settled on—every piece of furniture, artwork, coat rack, chair—had a brass plaque attached to it that read: “In memory of….” From the bedside of a patient receiving a bit of music therapy, I heard the peeping warbles of a piccolo, and I smelled the unmistakable scent of lasagna being fresh-baked in an oven. It was calm, almost pleasant…but not.
I stepped up to a counter halfway down the hallway and looked about expectantly.
“Look at this little guy,” came a woman’s voice from behind me.
I turned around to find a nurse—I could tell by her lavender-hued smock and name tag—holding a puppy up to my face, seven or eight weeks old at most—the dog, not the nurse—and some mixed breed of adorability.
“Oh my gosh,” I enthused, rolling my fingers over the wriggler’s head. “Who’s this?”
“It’s Darlene’s dog, Petunia. It’s her day off, but she brought her in for a visit.”
“That’s just terrific,” I said, nearly overwhelmed by some of that erratic emotion I experience in hospitals. God help me if I saw a Sasktel commercial about families reaching out to each other through the magic of telecommunication.
“Can I get you something, or help you?” the nurse asked as she nuzzled with her furry charge.
“I’m looking for Kimberly Enns? I think she’s working today?”
“Oh sure, she’s in the kitchen having tea.”
I looked at her blankly.
The nurse smiled kindly and walked me about ten steps to a doorway that led to a kitchenette and the cheesy smell of lasagna.
Kimberly Enns, noticeably pregnant, was wearing a pink smock with a happy-looking scarf pinned about her neck. She was—as were all my subjects that day—in her mid-thirties. She had a kind, round face and a head full of natural brown curls. She was sipping at a mug of something hot, and she was alone at a round kitchen table.
Sundowner Ubuntu Page 4
