Thomson said, “McKitrick, is everything all right?”
“What do you mean, Sarge?”
“Just what I said. Is everything all right?”
Elliot looked at him neutrally. “Yeah, everything is fine, Sarge, why?”
“You seem like you have something on your mind,” Thomson replied.
“Anything you want to talk about? Anything bothering you?”
“No, Sarge,” Elliot said. “Just thinking about that murder in Gyles
Point. And about what you just told me, about that crazy guy killing
himself in the car in Toronto.”
Thomson sighed. “OK, McKitrick.” Clearly whatever was bothering
him, Elliot would be keeping it to himself for the moment, which was
fine. But the next time he disappeared for two hours, Thomson was going
to hand him his head. Steering the conversation back to the business at
hand, he said, “Have you been back up to the cliffs where you saw . . . well,
whatever you saw? Did you check it out?”
“No, Sarge,” Elliot replied. “I haven’t. No reason to, I guess.”
“Well, now you have a reason. Why don’t you drive up there and take
a look around? Check it out. Just to rule everything out. It’s probably
nothing, but it never hurts to be sure.”
“No, sir. When do you want me to go?”
Thomson sighed again. As irritated as he had been by Elliot
being AWOL this morning for two hours, the tension was coming off
the younger man in waves, and it was irritating as hell. Maybe a hike
up to Spirit Rock would help him realign his priorities, or at the very
least adjust his attitude a bit. The murder at Gyles Point wasn’t officially
Thomson’s headache—yet—so he could afford to focus on the stack of
paperwork that had been building up on his desk.
“No time like the present, McKitrick. Shouldn’t take you more than
an hour or so, I should think. Just check it out.” He briefly considered
joining Elliot, thinking that it had been a while since he’d done that
particular hike on a fall morning, before realizing that the prospect of
traipsing through the bush this morning on what was likely a make-work
mission was entirely without appeal. And it was getting colder outside,
too. He was starting to feel the coming winter in his joints, though
Thomson wouldn’t have confessed to that under torture. “This time,” he
added pointedly. “Keep in touch.”
“Yes, sir, will do.” Elliot said.
To Thomson, he sounded relieved. Whatever the kid was going
through—girls, or whatever—Thomson hoped he’d get it out of his
system soon, because it would become a pain in the ass very quickly if he
didn’t.
Still, as he watched Elliot leave, he was barely aware that, as the
father of two daughters and no sons, he was far more fond of the kid
than he’d ever admit, even to himself.
Well before the lunch bell
rang, Finn had made his decision. He knew
that there was an excellent chance that he’d catch holy hell, and very
likely get suspended, but he didn’t care. Sadie was lost and no classroom
could hold him this afternoon.
He’d barely heard anything that his teacher, Mrs. Marshall, had said
all morning, though he’d kept a bright, pleasantly neutral expression on
his face. Only his eyes, red from crying, would have given any indication
that there was something wrong. Since he’d deftly avoided one-on-one
contact with anyone else in his class (and because Mrs. Marshall tended
not to look too hard at students unless she had to) no one had any idea
that he was teetering on the verge of his own personal hell.
He needed to find his dog, and he needed to find her before
something terrible happened to her. There was no one in his life he loved
more than Sadie—not even his parents. No one. Sadie was his baby. She
was his world.
When he’d woken his parents that morning, his father was initially
irritated—hardly unusual for his father in the morning, especially before
he’d had his coffee and locked himself in the upstairs bathroom with the
newspaper—but that irritation had quickly turned to a level of concern
that stunned and comforted Finn. His father had even driven around the
neighbourhood looking for Sadie. Finn had waited by the picture window
in the living room for any sign of his father’s car, praying that he’d see
Sadie, grinning foolishly in the back seat when he came back. When his
father had returned alone, looking frustrated, Finn had burst into fresh
tears.
His mother was almost as frantic as Finn, calling the neighbours
on either side to see if, by some miracle, Sadie had wandered into their
yards. But even as she did, in between calls, his mother kept muttering,
“There’s no
way
she could have gotten out of that yard. No way
at all
.”
“Do you think she . . . do you think some sort of animal might have . . .” Finn couldn’t bring himself to finish the thought.
“Don’t be silly, Finnegan,” his mother said, dialling the next number in her book. “Sadie is too big for an owl or a hawk to have carried her off. And any other animal would have had to get in—and out—with her. She
probably found some way to jump the fence.”
“There was a lot of barking last night,” Finn said hopefully. “Maybe
she wanted to join in with the other dogs?”
“Was there? I slept right through . . . Laura?” his mother said brightly. “Hi, it’s Anne Miller. Good morning! Yes, fine, thank you! Listen, Laura, I’m sorry to bother you, but Sadie’s missing. Yes, I know. I don’t know. Would you mind taking a look in your back yard and see if she’s there?”
His mother looked up at the ceiling, tapping her fingers along the counter by the wall as she waited for Mrs. Smythe to come back on the line. The finger tapping was something Finn knew she did when she was more upset about something then she wanted to let on. When she spoke again, Finn heard the disappointment in her voice and his heart sank. “No? Isn’t that strange. No, we have no idea. Thanks for looking, though, Laura. Oh, would you? That would be so nice. Yes, I hope she turns up, too. Finn is a
little upset. All right, give my best to Al. Yes, goodbye, Laura.”
“Mom,” Finn said. His bottom lip had begun to quiver. “I want to
stay home from school today. I want to look for Sadie.”
“Finn, there’s nothing you can do. Go get dressed for school. You can
look for her when you get home. I’ll call around. I’ll even call the police
station and let them know to keep an eye out for her.”
“Mom, I don’t
want
to go to school! I want to stay home and look for
my
dog
!”
“Finn, please.” His mother sighed. “I know you’re upset, but you
being upset isn’t going to bring Sadie home any sooner. It’ll all be fine,
you’ll see. I’m sure she hasn’t gone far. We’ll find her. I’ll take you out in
the car after school and we’ll look together.”
Finn wanted to shout that his mother didn’t care about Sadie, and if
she cared, she’d let him stay home, but he knew that wasn’t true. She did
care. He also knew that he was already as upset as he could stand to be,
and that a fight with his mother over whether or not he could stay home
was a fight he was bound to lose.
He’d gotten dressed and left for school, Sadie’s red rubber ball tucked
into the pocket of his jacket, thinking he could keep it together. By noon,
he realized he wasn’t going to be able to do it, because Sadie was all he
could think of.
All morning he’d mentally explored the horror show of possibilities
of what might have happened to Sadie—some more realistic than others,
but all equally awful.
He was haunted by one particular image—Sadie wandering, injured,
lost in the cliff area around Bradley Lake, perhaps with a broken leg, or
worse. Somehow the mechanics of how this might have occurred was less
important than the absolute
vividness
of the image.
He could see her, as though he were gazing into the Wicked Witch
of the West’s crystal ball in
The Wizard of Oz,
a movie his mother had
taken him to in Sault Ste. Marie when he’d been eight, and which had
both terrified and thrilled him. One particular scene in the film returned
to him now: the scene in the witch’s castle, where Dorothy sees Auntie
Em in the crystal ball, plaintively crying out her name, unable to find
her. At the time the scene had spoken to him about the terror of loss, of
separation from his mother, his home, and everything safe. But now it
just filled him with dread.
He pictured Sadie in the crystal ball instead of Auntie Em—lost,
hurt, terrified, and looking for Finn to protect her and bring her home.
The scene repeated itself in his mind all morning at school until
the possibility of sitting in his seat and listening to Mrs. Marshall drone
on about the geography of countries he knew he’d never visit made him
want to scream.
When the lunch bell rang, he waited till no one was looking, then
climbed the chain-link fence behind the schoolyard and ran like hell
along the streets behind the school, heading for Bradley Lake.
He’d considered meeting Morgan in their usual spot and telling her
that he wouldn’t be able to stay and eat lunch with her today because
Sadie was lost and he was going to go look for her, but he realized he
didn’t even want to waste the extra ten minutes it would take him to
detour to Matthew Browning.
In truth, Finn was wracked with guilt over his selfishness last night
in leaving Sadie out in the yard to fend for herself against whatever
had taken her away, just so he could get back to his horny dream about
Morgan naked in the lake.
For a treacherous fraction of a second, he considered blaming
Morgan for Sadie’s disappearance, then realized it was his dream, not
hers. She’d had no part in it. If there was any blame for abandoning
Sadie—and that was what he was now convinced he had done—the
blame was Finn’s alone, and he hated himself for it.
Elliot heard the boy
calling for his dog before he saw the flash of his red
jacket moving through the yellow leaves.
He had spent the last hour scouring the ledge area where he
thought he’d seen the crouching figure the previous day, but there was
nothing at all—none of the usual indicators of passage: no cigarette
butts, no obvious footprints, no noticeable disturbances of the foliage
and undergrowth. He hadn’t really expected to find them, but he still
hoped there would be something there he could tie to the Indian, even
tangentially. Nothing would have pleased Elliot more than to nail that
smug bastard in such a way that none of his fancy academic credentials
and smooth talking would help him out.
Elliot wasn’t a stupid man, nor was he unaware of the fact that
his feelings about Billy Lightning had as much to do with what he
represented—like Jeremy, a threat to the established social order of
the world with which he’d compacted—as they did with the Indian’s
snooty way of talking to him, as though the fact that he was a university
professor made him anything more than an Indian or, more to the point,
anything more than Elliot himself. Still, even separating all of those
variables from the mix, it still seemed a noteworthy coincidence that
Billy Lightning should just show up in Parr’s Landing the day after what
had happened in Gyles Point, and be talking about murders and crazy
people (as it turned out, dead crazy people) and local legends.
And now, it appeared that what he’d seen had been a trick of the
light, after all, or maybe a hiker. Or a kid, like this one who was calling
Sadie! Sadie!
in a high-pitched, ruptured voice as though he were being
broken on the rack.
Elliot gauged that the kid was about 200 yards directly above him,
close to the highest accessible point of the cliffs around the lake. It was a
dangerous place for a kid to wander for any reason, and not just because
of the ever-present danger of accidentally falling through some grown over mineshaft entrance, but because of the time of day—especially now,
at this time of the year when the dusk came so much earlier.
Elliot turned towards the sound of the kid’s voice and walked
towards it. He called out, “Hey, kid! Stay where you are—I’m coming for
you. I’m a police officer. Don’t move. It’s dangerous up there. Let’s get
you down.”
He still couldn’t see the kid, but he’d stopped calling for his dog.
Elliot figured that he might have startled him, so he called out again, “It’s
OK, kid. Just hold on. I’ll be there in a minute.”
Silence answered him. A sharp arrow of late-season Canada geese
streaked southward across the sky. The light was burnishing as the late
afternoon slouched towards evening. Elliot rounded a sharp turn on
the hill and, with three wide steps, he reached the plateau. He vaguely
recognized the kid standing there from one of his annual Elmer the
Safety Elephant police visits to the primary school, but couldn’t think of
his name—Frankie? Fenny? The kid’s face was pale and he’d obviously
been crying. His red windbreaker was muddy and there were pine needles
in his hair.
“Hey, kid, you all right?” Elliot said in his best Officer Friendly voice.
“What are you doing up here all by yourself?”
But the kid wasn’t looking at Elliot. He was staring into the opening
of a filthy hockey bag—a heavy one, too, judging by the way he was
holding it. Even from six feet away, Elliot caught a whiff of something
rotten coming from inside it. At the same moment, the kid seemed to
smell it, too, and he dropped the bag. It landed on the ground, making a
jangling metallic sound as it struck the earth.
The boy took two steps back, away from the bag. He pointed at it
and said, “That’s not mine.” He wiped his hands frantically on the legs of
his jeans as though he were trying to scrub them clean.
“Whose is it?” Elliot’s question was automatic, reflexive. When the
kid didn’t answer, but instead kept wiping his hands, Elliot walked over
to the bag, knelt down, and pulled open the flaps.
At first he didn’t know what he was looking at—metal, paper,
grease. No, more than just metal. Knives, some hammers. The blades
were stained, and there were streaks of red on the T-shirt inside. The
stench was awful—old blood, obviously, and something like putrescent
raw chicken skin, but also shit and sweat. He moved the bag away from
his face and held his breath. When he was sure he wasn’t going to throw
up, he took a deep breath of fresh air.