No, it was
horror
—not horror at the thought of vampires snatching
up Sadie, but rather at the idea that Finn would even joke about something
like that at a time like this.
Then she’d turned back to the stove, her posture rigid enough to snap
in a high wind. Finn sensed that his mother was waiting for his father
to come home before she even broached the topic of his preposterous
comment with him.
As excited as he was by his new awareness of what had happened to
his dog, Finn felt shamed by his mother’s silence. He knew it wasn’t what
she wanted to hear, because he suddenly saw the strain on her face that
Sadie’s death had caused. Selfishly, perhaps, he hadn’t considered that
anyone could be as affected by Sadie’s death as he was. Sadie had been
Finn’s dog, Finn’s great love, and Finn’s grief.
But at dinner, as she pushed her chicken pie around on her plate,
his mother appeared to be maintaining her composure by frayed, bloody
tendons.
Anne kept looking up at the kitchen wall clock with the carved grapes
on a vine, with “Bless This House” in elaborate cursive letters around the
clock’s face.
“Where can your father be?” she’d said, repeating it twice more
during the meal. But it didn’t sound like it did when she’d said it a
thousand times before. There was no good-natured exasperation in the
tone this time, no housewifely impatience about burned dinners, or food
getting cold. It was an actual question: clinical, tinged with the metallic
frostbite of growing panic. “He’s never this late.”
“Mom, he’s probably just working late at the mill. Or he stopped off
on the way home.”
“Finn, he . . .” She stopped herself in mid-sentence. “He went . . .”
Something in her voice pierced his self-distancing absorption in his
own thoughts of Sadie and vampires and grief. “He what, Mom? Where
did he go after work?”
“Eat your dinner, Finnegan.” Anne’s face had gone the colour of milk.
Her voice was robotic. “Your father will be home soon.”
But of course, he hadn’t been home soon. He hadn’t come home at
all. And now here it was, practically midnight.
From upstairs, Finn heard his mother calling a few of his friends
from down the Legion. None of them had seen Hank. Finn heard the
reluctant-to-disturb-your-family’s-dinner-sir deference in her voice
when she called his foreman at the mill, but he didn’t know where Hank
was, either.
No, no, no, sorry, no, Anne, we haven’t. . . . No, sorry. I’m sure he’ll be
home soon. . . . No, maybe he had car trouble? Stopped for a beer? Had to
finish something?
With every phone call, with every new confirmation that Hank
had cut out from the mill an hour earlier but that no one had seen him
since, Anne’s voice grew incrementally tighter and shriller. After the
last call, she slammed the receiver down hard enough for Finn to hear it
downstairs in his room.
Halfway up the stairs, he said, “Mom, are you OK?”
“Finn, I’m fine.” She sounded like she was crying. “Your father
should have been home hours ago. I’m at my wit’s end. Where the hell is
he? Why isn’t he home with us?”
He climbed the stairs and stood a few feet away from where she was
standing, the phone poised in mid-air as though she were about to make
another call. When she saw him, she put the phone down.
“Mom, where did Dad go after work? You started to tell me at dinner,
but you stopped. Why? Where did he go?”
“Finn, he said he was going to go find Sadie and bring her home so
he could bury her.” Anne began to weep. “He was going to stop by after
work and bring her back to us. I’m so very afraid he hurt himself up there
or something in the woods.”
Now it was Finn’s turn to blanch. “Mom, why did you let him go up
to Spirit Rock after I told you what happened to Sadie? You let him go up
there
at night
? After what I told you tonight? Are you
crazy
?”
For an instant, terror passed across Anne’s face like the shadow of
a cloud moving overland. In that moment, Finn saw everything he had
seen that morning on Spirit Rock reflected in his mother’s face. Their
synergy electrified him.
In that moment, she believed him, he could tell. That knowledge
both terrified and thrilled him, ripping asunder the security veil that was
keeping his twelve-year-old fantasies safely locked outside the back door
of reality. If his mother believed him about Sadie, or about the vampires,
then they could be real.
Then, the moment was over. Her adult face came back, and she
said, “Finn, stop it. There are no such things as vampires. Nobody killed
Sadie. I don’t have time to waste on this nonsense right now. Your father
is missing. What happened to Sadie this morning was . . . well, it was
something else.”
“What was it? Tell me!” he demanded. “
Tell me what I saw wasn’t what
I saw, Mom!
”
“Summer lightning!” Anne practically screamed. “I don’t know! Go
to your room
right now
! I can’t deal with this crap of yours right now,
Finnegan! Your father is
missing
! Do you understand me? I don’t have
time for all your Draculas and the rest of it!”
Finn’s face flamed. He turned on his heel and fled to his room,
slamming the door behind him. He flung himself across his bed feeling
impotent rage—but not at his mother, of course, even though she had
hurt his feelings by shouting at him, and even though he understood that
she was upset about his father.
He half hoped, half expected to hear the sound of her feet on the
stairs to his room to comfort him, or apologize, or to admit that she, too,
was deeply and gravely afraid that his father had been taken by the same
malefic force out there in the dark that had taken Sadie—but there was
nothing.
When he quietly opened the door to his room and listened, he heard
her talking to someone at the Parr’s Landing police station—maybe that
liar of a cop who had promised he’d look for Sadie, or maybe the old one
who had told them not to say anything to anyone about the bag of bloody
knives.
From the rising, near-hysterical crescendo of his mother’s voice,
whoever had answered the phone at the station wasn’t being very helpful
at all.
“He’s
never
late!” she shouted. “I’m not shouting!
Don’t tell me not
to shout!
My husband is missing!” And then, “My son found that bag of
bloody knives up there by the caves and you’re telling me that . . . I don’t
care
if Constable McKitrick didn’t come in to work today! That’s not my
problem! Do you mean to tell me that you can’t . . . Yes, I know it hasn’t
been twenty-four hours yet!” There was a long pause, then Anne said.
“So, I’m supposed to just
wait
. . . ? All right, if you promise you’ll take a
ride out there and take a look. Tonight! Yes, thank you.” She hung up.
“Mom . . . ?” She turned and saw her son back on the stairs. “Mom?
I’m sorry.”
“Come here, sweetheart,” Anne said. She opened her arms to her
son, and he ran into them. She felt his face against her shoulder and she
squeezed him tightly.
“Mom! Ow! You’re squishing me!” Finn yelped, not meaning it. He
snuggled in closer. “I love you, Mommy.”
Anne closed her eyes and pressed her face against his hair. It still
smelled like Prell from his shampoo before dinner. “I love you, too,
Finnegan.” She looked at the clock. It was nearly midnight. “OK, bedtime,
vampire hunter,” she said, obviously trying to take the sting out of her
earlier chastisement. “I’m going to stay up for just a little while and wait
for your daddy to come home. I want you to go to sleep.”
“You called the police, didn’t you, Mom? Was that the police?”
“Yes, sweetheart,” I did. “Just to be sure. You’re daddy is fine, don’t
worry.”
“Mom?”
“
What,
Finnegan?”
“Mommy,” he said solemnly. “You’re fibbing, aren’t you? Why are
you fibbing?”
“Finnegan—please, sweetheart. Please just go to bed now. Be a good
boy for your mom.” She ruffled his hair. “I’ll wake you up when Daddy
gets here, I promise.”
“OK, Mom,” he said. He turned to go back downstairs. Then he
turned around. His mother looked very small sitting in the orange
corduroy-covered chair. Impulsively, Finn walked back over to the spot
by the window and hugged her as tightly as he could. “Night, Mommy.”
“Night, baby,” Anne said. She patted his bottom through his pyjamas
and bathrobe. “I love you. Sleep tight.”
Finn reluctantly let his mother go, then went downstairs to his
bedroom to try to sleep while he waited for his father to get home.
Before switching out his bedside lamp, Finn glanced over at Sadie’s
empty dog bed across the room. When it hurt too much to breathe, he
switched off the bedroom light and let the darkness swallow him up and
carry him away from this terrible day.
What the blazes
is that young dunderhead doing? For Christ’s sake. He
drops out of sight, then has the nerve to drive around the goddamn town in his
cruiser with the lights off? And to drive past the window of the police station,
practically flipping me the bird? Is he on drugs?
Dave Thomson slammed his coffee cup down hard on his desk,
spilling some of it on his blotter. He pushed his chair back from his desk
and ran to the door of the station. He threw it open and stepped out onto
the sidewalk.
“Elliot,” Thomson bawled. “Goddammit, Elliot, get back here! Right
now, boy! I mean it!”
The police cruiser paused, as though waiting for Thomson to shout
something else. Then the brake lights winked redly in the blackness—
once, then twice, as the driver tapped the brake.
Well I’ll be a goddamned
jumped-up monkey-fucker!
Thomson seethed.
He’s actually
playing
with
me!
The car sped ahead, pausing a ways up the block. Again, the tapping
of the brake light—flick-flick.
I’m going to break his fucking ass!
Thomson grabbed his keys off the desk and let the door of the police
station slam shut behind him. He jumped behind the wheel of his own
brand new Impala and took off in pursuit of the police cruiser that was
now taunting him by maintaining a pace just slow enough to follow, but
still too fast for Thomson to catch up to without speeding—something
Thomson was loath to do in his own town, even at this hour.
Elliot—and he had no doubt it was Elliot, probably stark raving high
on pot, or God only knew what else he’d been getting into lately that
had made him act the way he’d been acting—led him on a merry chase
through the streets of Parr’s Landing, and out towards the edge of town,
driving without lights and making Thomson squint.
“Where are you going, you crazy bastard?” Thomson muttered. He
leaned his arm out the window and tried to signal to Elliot that he should
pull over. Instinctively, he reached down to activate a siren, but of course
there was no siren to activate. “Get back here, goddammit!” he shouted
again out the window. “Shit on a goddamn
stick
!”
Just when it looked like Elliot was headed for the road that led to
the cliffs (and on those roads, Thomson promised himself, he
would
open
her up and pull even with the little bastard and then break his fucking
ass), he turned off Percy Street and onto Brandon Nixon Road.
Where the
hell
is he going?
The cruiser sped up. Thomson floored it again, cursing his lack of
siren. He could think of no better use for the siren than right now—then,
when he caught Elliott, he was going to shove it so far up his goddamn
ass, Elliot would shit pieces of red cherry-top glass all the way to the
welfare office. He honked his horn several times, but to no avail. The
cruiser kept speeding ahead.
In the distance, Thomson saw the taillights of the cruiser abruptly
veer right, then wink out and vanish altogether.
What the blazes? Where
the hell did he go?
Thomson floored the accelerator till he reached the spot
where he’d lost track of Elliot. He craned his neck, trying to see where the
little bastard had gone.
Then, suddenly he saw the car. He also saw why the taillights had
disappeared. Elliot had parked it in front of the burned-out shell of the
Mike Tackacs Hockey Arena.
Got you, you little fucker,
he thought, gloating.
Your ass belongs to me.
Thomson pulled in behind and parked the Impala. He took his
flashlight out of the glove box and shone it alongside the cruiser.
The early morning electrical fire that had taken the hockey rink
down in ’59—killing a maintenance worker named Eric McDonald and his
young son, Timmy, who was skating while his father worked, thus adding
two more souls to Parr’s Landing’s already ample supply of ghosts—had
burned fiercely and efficiently, leaving only a husk that somehow still
smelled like smoke after all these years.
Why no one had torn it down in all this time was a mystery to
Thomson. It was as dangerous as all get-out. They’d rebuilt a new arena
on the other side of town—the Brenen Gyles Arena, so named after
Parr’s Landing’s one and only semi-famous contribution to the 1962
Ontario Junior A League, paid for in no small part by the Gyles Family,
who owned most of the town of Gyles Point—so there was no reason for
the ruins of the Takacs Arena to be standing at all.
The Parr family could have afforded to tear the Takacs down and
rebuild it themselves—hell, the old bitch could have paid for it out of
her change purse, but it would be a week of frosty Fridays in hell before
Adeline Parr would lift a finger to help the town do anything but work for
her.
As for Elliot, he must be high, Thomson decided. There was no other
reason for this entirely out-of-character behaviour.
“Elliot, you there?” he shouted. “Come on out, now. Stop this
foolishness. We can talk about it, whatever it is. But we can’t fix it until
we do. You need to come out right now, son. Don’t make me go in there
and find you.”