First and foremost in Elliot’s mind was that this was very likely
connected to the murder in Gyles Point. He knelt down and pulled his
hand up inside his sleeve, forming a cloth barrier against his hand. It
wasn’t gloves, but it was better than touching the bloody knives and
catching God-knew-what disease from the stinking T-shirt.
He nudged aside the metal and saw that there was a bound typescript
underneath. The title page was smeared with blood and dirt, but he was
able to read part of it:
Being the Last True Testament and Relation of Father
The rest of the text was unintelligible. The paper was warped from
exposure to water, the ink smeared and bedaubed with rain and mud.
It was a hefty manuscript. He judged there were at least 70 double-spaced typed pages in all. Awkwardly, he nudged the papers with his
cloth-covered knuckles, but it was futile. To see more, he was going to
have to turn the pages with his fingers, and he wasn’t going to do that
without gloves. At the very least, Thomson would kill him for messing up
evidence with his own fingerprints.
Turning his attention to the boy, he said, “What’s your name, kid?”
“Finn Miller,” the boy replied. “Am I in trouble?”
“No, you’re not in any trouble,” Elliot said in a reassuring voice.
“What are you doing up here? Shouldn’t you still be in school?”
Finn’s eyes brimmed. “I was looking for my duh-duh-dog,” he said.
His eyes spilled over. “My dog is lost. She’s been lost since last night.”
“Don’t cry, Finn,” Elliot said. “I’m sure your dog is all right. What’s
her name?”
“Sadie,” he replied. Elliot saw that Finn was struggling to regain his
composure. He admired the kid for that. “Her name is Sadie.”
“Is this where she usually likes to play?” he asked. He was consciously
easing the conversation so he could ask about the bag without spooking
the kid.
“We were up here a few days ago,” Finn said, glancing around. “Sadie
was scared by something up here.”
“Scared? Scared by what?”
“I don’t know,” Finn said. “By something. She was really upset. I
thought maybe she came back here to . . . I don’t know, to check it out or
something.”
“Is this where you found the bag?” Elliot said calmly. “Right here? Or
did you move it?”
Finn pointed to a clump of rocks and overgrowth a few feet away.
“There,” he said. “I found it there.”
Elliot walked over to the spot and nudged aside some of the
branches and broken tree limbs with the toe of his boot. It looked like
a crack in the rocks, about four and a half feet long, maybe six inches
across. It could be the opening to some sort of animal’s burrow, perhaps,
or a snake hole. Nothing out of the ordinary, certainly not somewhere
a man could hide. And yet, as he glanced around again, he knew that
somewhere the owner of this bag was very likely hiding. For the first
time in two days, he reached down to his holster and touched the gun,
just to feel its reassuring solidity against his hip.
“Finn,” Elliot said. “I think you’d better come with me. We can stop
off at your house and see your Mom and Dad, and they can come to the
police station with us. Is that OK with you?”
“What’s in the bag? I saw knives and stuff. It sure stinks, too.”
“Yeah,” Elliot said casually. “Knives and stuff. Probably left behind
by a hunter. But we have to make sure it’s all OK and that nobody got
hurt up here. Gave you a scare, did it?” Elliot tried to chuckle, but he
realized it sounded fake and this kid wasn’t stupid. Elliot knew he would
see right through it.
“I’m not scared by a stupid hockey bag full of knives,” Finn said. “I’m
scared about not knowing where my dog is.
“You said I wasn’t in trouble,” Finn continued. “Right? You
said
.”
“Right,” Elliot said soothingly. “You’re not in trouble. It just looks
like you might have found something important, and my sergeant would
probably like to hear how you found it.”
“But what about Sadie?” Finn said urgently. “I can’t leave. I have to
look for my dog. It’s getting dark. I can’t leave her out here.” He looked
around wildly. For a moment Elliot thought he was going to bolt back off
into the woods.
“I’ll tell you what, Finn,” Elliot said, reaching out and putting his
hand on Finn’s shoulder. “After we go to the police station and you talk
to the sergeant, I’ll drive you home, then I’ll take a drive around and look
for Sadie myself. I’ll even come back here—well, maybe not all the way
up here, since you’ve already looked, but around the lake. I’ll see what I
can find. I bet she’s home by tomorrow, one way or another. But we really
have to get to the police station, just in case what you found is really
important.”
“Promise?” Finn looked doubtful. “You promise you’ll come back
and look for her?”
“I promise,” Elliot said. “Now let’s get back down to the car. Have you
ever been in police car before? It’s kinda fun.”
Finn didn’t answer. Instead, he pushed past Elliot and started down
the path from the cliff towards the lake without looking back.
When the police cruiser
pulled into the driveway, the first thing Anne
Miller thought was,
They found Sadie
! Finn would be so relieved. That is,
he’d be relieved after he was told he’d been grounded for a month. Mrs.
Brocklehurst, the school secretary, had called her that afternoon to ask if
Finn had her permission to leave school.
Anne had told Mrs. Brocklehurst that Finn had just lost his dog and
was very upset. No, he didn’t have her permission, Anne explained, but
she’d appreciate it if the school would look the other way just this one
time. She’d speak to Finnegan when he got home and she personally
guaranteed he’d be in school tomorrow.
Mrs. Brocklehurst, who had been the primary school secretary
for twenty years, loved animals, said it would be fine, and she hoped
Finnegan found Sadie soon, too. She’d lost a collie named Mingus when
she was a little girl and it just about broke her heart. “I think a cougar got
him,” she said sadly. “I have nightmares about it even today.”
Anne hadn’t even considered cougars, or jackals, or anything of the
kind, and her heart sank. But she’d thanked Mrs. Brocklehurst and hung
up the phone. Then she went to the kitchen and fixed herself a stiff rum
and coke, even though she never drank during the day.
When she saw Finn in the back seat of the police cruiser, her hand
flew to her chest and she gasped in shock. She opened the front door and
said, “Finn, what happened? Are you all right?” The driver’s side door
opened, and the policeman stepped out. Anne recognized him, of course.
“Constable McKitrick, what’s going on ? What’s my son doing in a police
car?”
“It’s nothing serious, Mrs. Miller,” Elliot said politely. “Finn here was
up by Bradley Lake looking for Sadie. I found him and brought him home.
That’s all.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Anne replied. To her son, she said, “Finn, the
school called, young man. You left early today. You and I are going to have
a talk once your father gets home from the mill. Go on up to your room.”
“Actually, Mrs. Miller, Finn found something up on the slope near
Spirit Rock, and we’d really appreciate it if you and he could come down
to the police station and have a talk with Sergeant Thomson and I about
how that happened.”
“I’m sorry, I’m confused—he ‘found something’?” Anne said. “What
did he find? And what does that have to do with him coming down to
the police station? I thought this was about him playing hookey. Or that
you’d found Sadie. That’s his dog. I called the station about her earlier
today.”
“No, ma’am,” Elliot said. “No sign of Sadie yet, but I’m sure she’ll
turn up. In the meantime, I’m sure it’s nothing to be concerned about,
Mrs. Miller, but there was an . . . incident up at Gyles Point recently, and
we just want to make sure that what Finn found isn’t connected in any
way to that incident.”
“What on earth did he find? Finn? What did you find?”
“It was a bag of
knives,
Mom,” Finn said. He wrinkled his nose.
“They’re all bloody and stuff, and they
stink
.”
“Oh my God,” Anne said, gasping. “And you think they’re . . .”
“We don’t know anything yet, Mrs. Miller,” Elliot said. “But if you
and Finn would come down to the police station, we might be able to
put this together and make some sense of it. Then,” he added winningly,
winking at Finn, “we can get back to looking for Sadie.”
Anne hesitated. She looked at Finn standing awkwardly beside the
police car. His hair was askew and his clothes were filthy. The emotional
fracture of his separation from Sadie seemed to have actually bent Finn’s
posture, and there was something
broken
in his demeanour that she’d
never seen before. The last thing she wanted to do was go down to the
police station right now to discuss Finn’s gruesome discovery just before
dinnertime—it was probably nothing but hunters’ debris anyway. At
the same time, she realized that if they cooperated now, she’d have the
attention of the Parr’s Landing constabulary, which might chivvy them
on when it came to looking for Sadie.
“I’ll just call my husband and let him know where we’ll be,” Anne
said. “That way he can meet us there. I’d really prefer if my husband was
present if you’re going to question Finnegan.”
“Would it be all right if we called your husband from the station,
Mrs. Miller?” Elliot countered. “This is sort of important, and I’d rather
not waste your time any more than we have to. And we’re not going to
‘question’ Finnegan, we’re just going to ask him some things and take a statement. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Anne looked from Elliot to Finn, then back to Elliot. “All right, if it’s
that important. Is it?”
“It is, ma’am,” Elliot said firmly. “It is. I’d appreciate it.”
Without another word, Anne went into the house and took her
purse off the hall table and took her coat out of the closet. When she
came back out, Finn was already in the back seat of the car, waiting for
her, and Elliot was holding the passenger-side door open.
As they drove through town towards the police station, Anne
realized she’d never been inside a police car in her life and, fancifully, that
Parr’s Landing looked different through its windows. The plain houses
and shops they passed—houses and shops she’d passed her whole life—
suddenly seemed alive with the possibilities of secret lives occurring
behind their closed doors.
This must be the way policemen see the town,
she
thought. She supposed that was what the police were for—to make sure
that the secret lives of other people remained, if not pure, then at least
contained
.
The more practical part of her hoped against hope that none of her
neighbours would see her and Finn in the police car and start gossiping.
Anne glanced at Finn, who was staring out his window. He was lost
in his own thoughts—doubtless thoughts about Sadie. Anne was also
grieving for Sadie’s disappearance, and worried, but she knew better
than to break down in front of Finn.
She reached over and gently squeezed his hand.
When Finn didn’t respond, Anne held his hand until he extricated
it from hers. Finn did this gently, as though to reassure his mother that
it wasn’t
her
hand, per se, that he found unbearable, but rather that any
human contact at all right now was a sorry substitute for the feeling
of Sadie’s head under his chin, the soft black fur tickling his neck as he
held her body close to his and inhaled her warm dog scent, and felt her
heartbeat.
Later, at the station,
while Anne tried unsuccessfully to reach her
husband on the telephone, Finn told the police everything he could think
of about how he’d found the bag up by Spirit Rock. The two cops listened
closely, but gave no indication one way other another what they were
thinking.
The older one—Sergeant Thomson—put on plastic gloves and
looked through the bag. He’d kept his back turned to Finn and his mother
while he did so, and all they heard was the clink of metal on metal, and
then the sound of the hockey bag being zipped closed.
When he turned around again, Thomson asked Finn a series of
questions that Finn answered as best he could while the younger one—
McKitrick—took notes.
No, Finn said, he couldn’t think of anything else. No, he hadn’t seen
anyone. No, he hadn’t been alerted by any noise—he’d only gone up that
far because of Sadie’s terror of it when they’d walked there that morning
a few days ago. He thought maybe she’d gone back up there. He didn’t
know why he thought that—it was just a possibility.
“That’s what dogs are like sometimes,” he’d said with a shrug. “I
thought maybe I’d find her there. I hoped I would.” He paused, his voice
thickening. “I didn’t.”
“I think that’s all, Finn,” Thomson said. “I think we’ve pretty well
covered everything we need to know. Mrs. Miller, thank you so much for
coming in with Finn. Constable McKitrick will drive you home now.”
“You’ll look for Sadie?” Finn said hopefully. He turned to Elliot and
said, “You said you would, remember? You promised.”
“I will, Finn,” Elliot said. He glanced uneasily at Thomson. “I promise.”
“Mrs. Miller, Finn?” Thomson said. “If you don’t mind, I’d appreciate
it if you didn’t talk about this for a bit. Don’t tell your neighbours or—
especially you, Finn—your friends. Let’s consider this our secret for a
while, until we figure out what’s going on. It wouldn’t do for rumours to
be circulating about something that may well be . . . well, nothing.”
“
May
well be?” Anne demanded. “It’s a hunter’s bag, isn’t it? You’re
not suggesting it might be something else? You don’t think that someone
was . . . well, that people were hurt, do you?”
“Very likely it’s a hunter’s bag, Mrs. Miller,” he replied calmly.
“But you know how these stories grow in small towns. Like I said, I’d
appreciate it if you folks would just keep it under your hat for a little bit.
I will personally call you when we know for sure what’s going on.”