Elliot pulled over to the side of the road and waited until his
heartbeat slowed down and his breathing returned to normal. He opened
the driver’s side door and stepped out into the cold late-morning sunlight
and took a deep breath, then another. As he did, his vision cleared and he
felt the panic recede.
The sword cut both ways, he realized. Jeremy wasn’t back in town to
threaten him. Jeremy was back in town because Chris needed him there.
The Parrs didn’t want another scandal. Old lady Parr had sent Jeremy to
a lunatic asylum. She’d threatened Elliot’s old man with ruin if he didn’t
beat a lesson into Elliot that he’d never forget. The cuts had healed, but
the feel of the whip cutting through his clothes into his flesh was one
Eliot would never forget.
No, whatever else was going to happen, there would be no concerns
about exposure from the Parrs, any of them. They had as much to lose as
he did, scandal-wise. No way was Mrs. Parr going to let either Jeremy or
Chris make any trouble for him.
The thought comforted him, and slowly Elliot grew calm again.
The wind suddenly came up and the trees around him shivered,
releasing clouds of orange and red leaves against the hard blue sky. Elliot
shielded his eyes against the sunlight with his fingers and watched the
leaves blow away across the treetops towards Bradley Lake.
In fairness to Jeremy, there had been nothing threatening or angry
in his demeanour last night at O’Toole’s. On the contrary, Jeremy had
shown traces of the very gentleness and vulnerability that had drawn
Elliot to him in first place when they were boys, so many years ago. Last
night, Elliot had tried to hurt Jeremy, to drive him away. He’d succeeded
in hurting him, but Jeremy hadn’t been angry at all. There had been
nothing in his eyes but a terrible sadness that Elliot had tried very hard
not to see.
But he had seen it, even if last night he told himself he hadn’t. And at
that moment, in his privacy by the side of the road, with nothing around
but the reddened forest and the cliffs of Spirit Rock in the distance, he
could admit it.
Perhaps if Jeremy
had
been angry, if he’d shown Elliot hatred instead
of that terrible gentleness, Elliot would have been able to get it up for
Donna Lemieux right away instead of failing, for the first time in his life,
to get wood until he did her from behind.
He realized that the thought should disturb him, but he found
himself smiling instead. To think of Jeremy and to smile felt good. The
muscles of his face relaxed. He hadn’t realized he’d been clenching his
jaw until he unclenched it and released all the tension he’d been holding
there. He felt the release of that tension spread to every part of his body.
He breathed in the cold air easily and deeply. He’d give Jeremy a call this
evening, or drive up to Parr House, and talk it out. There was no reason
why they shouldn’t be friends, or at least on some sort of conversational
terms. They were just a couple of guys who had been good friends once a
long time ago—OK, maybe a bit more than friends, maybe, but it was a
long time ago. Then was then and now was now.
Elliot climbed back into the car and turned the key in the ignition.
He needed to get back to the station and back to work. He was a cop.
There would be time for all this personal crap later.
On his way back
into town, Elliot passed Donna Lemieux’s plain white
house on house on Hobbs Street and felt a stab of guilt. On a whim, he
pulled into her driveway. He’d been an asshole to her last night as well as
to Jeremy Parr. Fixing the Jeremy situation was going to take some time,
but an apology, some charm, and some reassurance of her desirability
would go a long way towards making things right with Donna. Elliot
prided himself on being a hard-ass, but he’d never thought of himself as
an asshole, and didn’t plan to start now. He wished he’d brought flowers,
but realized immediately what an idiotic thought that was.
Elliot pulled into her driveway and got out. Instinctively he
looked both ways to see if anyone had seen him. A police car parked in
someone’s driveway was a universally acknowledged symbol of trouble
in the neighbourhood and the last thing he wanted to do was compound
last night’s romantic disaster by embarrassing Donna, making her a
spectacle to her neighbours. But there was no one in the street, and no
one was peering at him from behind the curtains, at least so far as he
could tell.
He knocked on her door and waited. Then, receiving no answer, he
knocked again, more loudly. He glanced over his shoulder to where her
car sat in the driveway. She’d left his place at—what, three-thirty in the
morning? Four? She’d obviously driven home in one piece because the
car was right there. Had she gone out already? Not likely. Not without
the car. He knocked again, and peered in through her front window. The
living room beyond the window was dim. There was no movement at all.
She’s sleeping
, Elliot thought practically.
She came over to my house
after a night shift and probably didn’t get back here till four a.m. And she was
pissed. She’s probably sleeping, and the last thing I want to do is wake her up
and have her answer the door with her hair all messy and her face puffed up
and give me shit for waking her up, on top of everything else.
Elliot walked back to the cruiser. He glanced back over his shoulder
at the silent white house with the dark windows. A thought came and
went so quickly that he barely registered it as a thought before dismissing
it: the thought that the house felt empty to him. No, not just empty—
absent of life.
It was an irrational thought—emotional, illogical, very unlike Elliot
the police officer, therefore, in his mind, very unlike Elliot, period. His
rational, logical thought, on the other hand, was that Donna Lemieux
was inside, sleeping like the dead, after a rough night for which he was
at least partly to blame. That was reality. He would drive out to O’Toole’s
tonight and make amends. Maybe even bring flowers. Perhaps flowers
would seem like a better idea once the sun had gone down.
Elliot sighed again, thinking in abstract terms that having a
conscience was a burden he hadn’t had to consider until very recently,
and one he could happily do without.
He got back into the cruiser and drove to the station as quickly as
he could, realizing that nearly two hours had passed since his encounter
with Christina Parr and Billy Lightning, and he was going to have to
think on his feet if he was going to come up with a plausible excuse for
Sergeant Thomson as to where the hell he’d been all morning.
Sergeant Thomson
was sitting at his desk, talking on the telephone,
when Elliot walked through the door of the Parr’s Landing police station.
He looked up irritably and motioned with his hand for Elliot to sit down.
The gesture pushed Thomson’s coffee cup perilously close to the edge of
the desk. Elliot lunged forward and grabbed the coffee cup just before
it pitched over the edge of the desk. Pleased with himself for this act of
minor heroism, he grinned and mimed relief. Elliot whispered, “Whew!”
but Thomson was jotting down notes on a pad of paper and didn’t even
look up.
“You say the yard was secure? Right, of course. Well, you know how
some dogs are. What kind did you say he was?
She,
sorry. A Lab? Well,
was she in heat? Spayed. OK, I see. Well, maybe . . . no, I don’t know.
But we’ll definitely keep an eye out. Of course. No, I wouldn’t worry. Yes,
we’re going out a bit later. We’ll do a loop of the town and take a look.
Yes, I promise. Of course. Yes, it’s hard. Had one myself when I was a boy.
Yes, they do, don’t they? All right Mrs. Miller. Thanks. We’ll let you know.
All right. Bye, now.” Then, to Elliot: “Where the hell have you been? The
phone has been ringing off the hook. What the hell happened last night?
Was it a full moon?”
“Sorry, Sergeant,” Elliot lied, thinking fast on his feet. “Someone
thought they heard guns up at the lake. I thought, hunters. Didn’t see
anything.”
Thomson was brusque. “Never mind, I don’t care. OK, aside from
the call I just took from some woman about her son’s lost dog, I also had a
call from the mother of that waitress from O’Toole’s—Donna something.
Donna Lemieux.”
Elliot froze. “What about Donna Lemieux? What happened to her?”
“What happened? Nothing, probably. Her mother went to her house
this morning and she wasn’t there. I told her—nicely—that it’s not
suspicious for someone not to be at home during the day. Her car was
in the driveway, too, according to her mother, so she probably went out
with friends or something. Her mother said she had ‘a feeling about it’
and wanted us to know. Mothers, Jesus.”
“We all have them,” Elliot said automatically, treading water. “Did
she say anything else?”
“Just that she went into her daughter’s house and said it didn’t look
like she’d slept there last night.”
“But the car . . .”
“That’s what I told her. The car is in the driveway. All we can do
is wait and see what develops. I’m sure it’ll be nothing. It’s too early to
raise the panic alarm at this point. Besides, we have other things to think
about. Early this morning I was talking with my contact at the RCMP
in Toronto. Surprise, surprise—Dr. Lightning’s story about his father’s
murder and the fact that he thinks it was committed by that student of
his father’s—the crazy one, Weal—just got a bit more complicated.”
“Oh, yeah? How so, Sergeant?” Elliot hoped that the forced neutrality
of his tone had effectively camouflaged his relief at the fact that they had
moved on, away from the minefield topic of the possible disappearance
of Donna Lemieux.
“According to the RCMP, Richard Weal is dead,” Thomson said. “Has
been for a bit less than a year now.”
“Dead?”
“Dead as a damn doornail,” Thomson said. To Elliot, he sounded
more satisfied than bemused. Maybe the Indian had pissed him off,
too, more than Elliot had realized. “Car-over-the-cliff crash, apparently.
Suicide. In January of this year. A car went off the Scarborough Bluffs
in Toronto. They found a pile of clothing and Weal’s identification. Neat
little folded pile, just like a crazy person would do on a bloody cold winter
night. He must have gotten into the car naked and just driven it over the
edge, right onto the beach. Metro Police in Toronto said the body inside
the wreck was pretty burned up, but the I.D. was right there on top of the
pile of clothes. Old I.D.,” he added. “From the time when he was locked up
in the loony bin, years ago. But it was definitely him. Metro said it was an
open-and-shut case, once they contacted the nuthatch where he’d been
locked up. His doctors said they weren’t surprised.”
Elliot said, “So where does this leave the Indian’s story?”
“Well,” Thomson said. “I’m thinking we can pretty much put the
notion of Richard Weal running around committing murders in Gyles
Point and roaming around Parr’s Landing to rest. Whoever did that to
that old man on the Point, it wasn’t Richard Weal.”
Elliot paused for a moment. “Sarge?” he said.
“What?”
“Sarge, the other day I was out at Bradley Lake looking around.”
“So?”
“So,” he said. “I think I saw something.”
“You
think
you saw something? You
think
you saw something, or you
saw
something?”
“No, I did see something,” Elliot said firmly. “Up by the cliffs. It was
a man, I think. Prowling up on the ledges. I thought it was a kid, or some
hikers or something. I didn’t really think anything of it at the time.”
Not
strictly true,
Elliot admitted to himself.
It spooked me something fierce
.
“I’m just wondering if . . .”
“If what?” Thomson said impatiently. “Come on, McKitrick, get to
the point.”
“Well, in light of this new development, my question is, why is the
Indian in Parr’s Landing, and isn’t it kind of a coincidence that he arrives
here with some story about a guy who just so happens to be dead, right
around the time that somebody commits a murder a few miles from
here?”
“Still nothing solid connecting Billy Lightning to what happened
at Gyles Point,” Thomson said. “And the assumption is that there was
a murder, but we can’t rule it a murder since there’s no body,” Thomson
said. “The dead man wasn’t connected with either Lightning, his father,
or Weal—Weal, who we now know to be deceased. As far as the law is
concerned, Billy Lightning may be an odd duck, but he’s not a criminal.
Not yet, anyway.”
“Something doesn’t add up here,” Elliot said stubbornly. “I just feel
it. I feel it in my bones that there’s something wrong here.”
“There could be something wrong, but until there’s some evidence,
there isn’t anything I can do. Look, Elliot,” Thomson warned. “I know
you don’t like Dr. Lightning, but I don’t want you jumping any guns, or
making any accusations you can’t back up that are going to come back
and bite you—or me—in the ass. The man’s a professor; he’s not just
some random vagrant. Be careful.”
“But—”
“If you find something solid, we can move on it,” Thomson said with
finality. “Until then, hands off. I don’t want any problems.”
Elliot remembered Lightning’s threat to him that very morning and
kept his mouth shut.
Thomson’s own instincts, honed over many more years of police
work than Elliot’s, signalled to him that there was something going on,
not with Billy Lightning, but with Elliot himself. He looked like he hadn’t
slept in a couple of days, and there was a sullenness and a tension to the
younger man that was entirely alien to his character as Thomson knew
it. Disappearing for two hours under some bullshit pretext of looking
for illegal hunters wasn’t like Elliot McKitrick at all. He wasn’t dating
anyone in particular, as far as Thomson knew, which more or less ruled
out woman trouble. But then again, who knew? Something was very
clearly bothering the younger man.