The Night Bell (16 page)

He sat at the kitchen table fidgeting with his fork. She sat down across from him with her own plate, and silently they began to eat. Alan’s focus stayed resolutely on what was on his plate, and he neither spoke nor seemed to hear anything when he was eating. Sometimes she imagined him as a rescued dog: frightened, but hungry for food and comfort. She said his name and he looked up at her quickly and then back down at his meal.

“Alan? Do you like it here?” He didn’t answer. “Do you love Mom and Dad? Can you look at me and answer me? Sweetheart?”

The affectionate moniker made him smile in a mysterious way. “Can I have another egg?”

“Yes. But are you going to answer any of my questions?”

“After my egg.”

She got up and put the flame on again under the pan. The lard began to liquefy right away. Hazel cracked another egg and watched the whites spit fat. “What was it like at the Fort Leonard home, Alan?”

“They didn’t have eggs for dinner.”

“I bet. Were you scared there?” She flipped the egg.

“Don’t break my yolk!”

Like a starving animal, he watched her slide the egg onto his spotless plate. He burst the yolk and watched it flow. “There was mean laughing and sad crying and scared shouting. And it was cold.”

“It sounds awful.”

“There was two dogs tied up outside the door and I could see them from the top of the stairs on the second floor. They trained them to bite kids.” He paused to chew a flap of egg white. “I don’t like dogs.”

“So you must be happy here,” she exclaimed. “To have a place where you’re safe and people love you.”

“People don’t love me,” Alan said. “They want to chain me up.”

“Now, why would you say that?” She reached to put her hand on top of his, but he twitched it away before she could touch him.

“It doesn’t matter,” he muttered. “I know how to escape.”

She gave him a bowl of butterscotch ice cream afterward and they sat down in front of the television to watch
The Phil Silvers Show
. Alan got the broad humour of Bilko and his hapless cohorts. Hazel preferred
I Love Lucy
. Her own mother was nothing like Lucy. She had none of Lucy’s joy,
Lucy’s tears, Lucy’s crazy passions. And her father wouldn’t have known what to say to a man like Desi Arnaz. But when they watched together, they laughed together. Alan was doubled over on the floor, laughing at the ludicrous exploits of the denizens of the army camp.

“You know real life is nothing like this,” she whispered into his ear.

“It should be,” he said.

Their parents came home earlier than expected, and Gord Drury was with them. The three adults patted a light rain off the fronts of their coats. “Bilko!” said Drury. “I love this show.”

“Me too,” said Alan. He’d met Drury before and the two liked each other.

“Come on,” said her mother, gesturing at Hazel. “Let’s put the kettle on and let Gord and Alan finish watching the show.” Hazel followed her mother through to the kitchen, looking once over her shoulder to see if her father was staying with the commander and her brother, or if he was coming in for tea. He stayed put.

“Boil the kettle, Hazel.” Her mother leaned against the stove and lit a cigarette. Hazel started the flame for the kettle. “How was he tonight?”

“Hungry.”

Her mother laughed. “He’s more expensive to feed than a team of horses.”

“What’s happening in there?”

“Don’t worry about them. Gord knows how to talk to people.”

“Does he know how to talk to
Alan
?” Hazel asked. “I don’t think Alan understands what’s going on.”

“He will.”

Her mother’s voice sounded wrong. “Do
you
think he had something to do with Carol’s disappearance?” Hazel asked.

“Stranger things have happened.”

“You don’t believe him,” she said quietly. “You’re his mother. How can you not believe him?”

“It doesn’t matter if I do or not. He’s still my child and I’ll stand behind him just as I would stand behind you.”

“What kind of thing is that to say?” Hazel cried. “If you don’t believe him, why don’t you just send him back? Maybe he’d be better off in Fort Leonard. At least there no one pretends to care about him!”

She stormed out of the kitchen before the kettle began to sing. The doors to the den were closed and hushed voices spoke beyond it. She wanted to go in and tell them what she thought of their suspicions. If anything, Alan finding the silver pendant was a sign that Carol
was
alive. Maybe Carol herself had planted it! She hadn’t been particularly nice to Hazel that afternoon at the Pit – why put it past her to complicate life for her and her family?

Maybe the adults knew better; maybe both of her parents loved her new brother, their new son. It was going to
take time to civilize him, but he was no monster. He was a sweet kid, only twelve; he knew nothing about the world.

She changed into her nightgown in the bathroom. She tried not to look at herself in the mirror whenever she was changing, but she stole a glance when she was down to her underwear. Two years ago, the body in the mirror hadn’t existed. She lifted one arm and gazed upon the three black hairs that straggled out of the scoop of her armpit. There was more below now and she was growing the beginning of some curves. She remembered Andrew Pedersen dancing with her at the Christmas Dance at school. He had danced with the body in the mirror. There’d been only three or four layers of fabric between them, and she’d felt him against her. She knew he’d been aware of her as well. He’d go into grade thirteen next year and then who knew where? He’d told her he was thinking of law school.

The voices continued to filter up the stairs even after Hazel had closed her bedroom door and climbed into bed. She couldn’t make out the words, but her mother was in there with them now; Hazel recognized the song of her voice. She closed her eyes and listened to the murmuring. It changed into something else, and then finally into a colour and a feeling, and long before her parents and Commander Drury were finished with Alan, she’d fallen into a featureless sleep.

Micallef’s department store had been run by a Micallef for five generations and almost everyone in the county shopped there sooner or later. It was the Eaton’s dealer north of Mayfair for central Ontario, which made it a hub for travellers. A steady stream of people stopped at Micallef’s to pick up a shipment. The big red
Eaton’s
name – printed right onto the kraft paper the packages came wrapped in – was one of the commonplace sights in her life. “We’ll see about you being the first lady Micallef to run the place,” her father sometimes said. But once, last summer, he’d put his hand on hers and said, “That’s not going to be the life for you, is it, Hazel?”

The occasion for this comment was an early morning fishing trip. They’d gone out for walleye and bass and pickerel in Gannon Lake. By the age of twelve, Hazel was coming out in her father’s banged-up rowboat a few times each summer to drop worms and bits of liver on hooks into the underwater reeds. She didn’t like fishing with live frogs, but they’d compromised on how he treated them: he could only fish with them if he didn’t hook them through the mouth. If her dad could scoop one up on the end of the emergency paddle, he’d hook it through the foot and throw it in. “If no one wants him, all he’ll have is a hole in his foot.”

He’d convinced her that it wasn’t cruel in principle, since frogs got eaten by fish all the time. But she didn’t like the part where they helped the fish get the frogs. Frogs had eyes. They saw what was coming. She was certain they felt fear.

Her father maintained that they, with their fishing rods, were just part of the life cycle. “Some frogs get eaten by fish that get eaten by
us
. How is that wrong when it’s all about eating in the first place? There should be enough to go around, and if there isn’t, then everything might go to you-know-where in a you-know-what.”

On this morning in early June, he had been smoking a rare pipe against a pink sky, the colour of spring trout before they get their fill of insects. They could see the dark backs of the bass lurking in the glowing milfoil below them. The bass were logy, but the walleyes rose to the stinktaste of the bait as soon as they put their hooks into the water. She and her father began hauling them in. He stunned them with a small club and gutted them. There was something present in the thrashing silver muscle when he pulled them in over the gunwale that was no longer there after he’d drawn the knife through the tender white belly.

Out of one of the walleyes came a living spring peeper, blinking its eyes in the sudden light. “You remember the argument about frogs we had? You argued me in circles, saying we were
abetting
them. The fish.” He laughed at the memory. “Isn’t that what you said?”

“I said I didn’t like you hooking them through their mouths.”

“OK, so …” He held the frog out to her at arm’s length by one of its feet. It flapped its other leg without convinction.
“Here’s a free frog, pre-eaten, half-dead. Even you could fish with this one.”

“No way,” she said. He narrowed his eyes at her. “It’s double jeopardy.” (She hoped she’d remembered what that was – she hadn’t been able to focus all that well when Andrew was explaining it to her.)

He narrowed his eyes at her. “What about survival of the fittest?” he asked.

She pointed at the water. “Let it go.”

“What about getting two fish with one frog?”

She shot her father a menacing look. “So there’s no mercy if it’s just business?”

“Touché. And no, there isn’t. Or there shouldn’t be. There’s only mercy in life. Sometimes.”

“That’s why you should let it go.”

He did. He dropped it into the water, and it kicked gamely and then just floated above the weeds. What did it mean to rescue that frog from its fate only to send it to another, identical fate? Interrupting a cycle didn’t change its outcome. What kind of lesson was that? Below the frog, a dark shape was beginning to form.

Her father leaned forward and put his hand on top of hers. “I used to hope you’d want to manage the store one day.”

“I don’t want to sell clothes, Dad.”

“No, I know you don’t. I was hoping, but that’s not going to be the life for you, is it, Hazel? You’re your mother’s daughter,” he said. “It’s not mercy that either of you wants, though.”

“What is it?” she asked, watching the column of fish coalesce. They became a single muscle surging upward.

“Beware a man seeking justice, my Uncle Manny used to say.” He relit his pipe. “You didn’t know Manny.” The tossed match made a tiny sizzle in the lake. That was when she saw the frog was gone.

The morning after Gord Drury’s visit, the house was gravely silent. Hazel found her mother standing at the kitchen sink, smoking and looking through the window. In the den, Alan was watching
Gerald McBoing-Boing
, the volume turned down all the way. His spoon traced a metronomic arc between a punchbowl full of Rice Krispies and his mouth.

She heard the sound of a newspaper being folded in the library. Normally her father would be at the store by this hour, but when she crept silently down the hall, there he was, dressed in his suit, all but his left shoulder and leg hidden by the high-backed chair. She wanted to ask him a question, but she couldn’t think of how to put it. She moved away from the library door and stood paralyzed against the wall. It wasn’t until she heard her mother utter a single, choking sob, that she knew for sure that Alan was a suspect in the disappearance of Carol Lim.

Hazel had not thought of her brother or her father except glancingly in many years. Her father had been dead for eighteen years; Alan, for twenty-three. That had been a hard time, managing her own and her mother’s grief, while almost single-handedly looking after two young children. The question of justice for Alan would be forever left open. He’d never speak in his own defence again. He was twelve years old when Carol Lim disappeared, and he’d been big enough to hurt someone. Maybe without the protection of his adopted parents they’d have scooped him up for it. And then who knows what might have happened to him. The present case was a trap door to her past.

And they were really off it now. There was full radio silence from the RCMP and they’d all been warned that
they were to carry on with cases that had been
assigned
to them, and nothing else. The Mayfair unit had been told the same thing: hands off, stand down. Macdonald was still on Renald’s disappearance, but it felt like a formality now. Mel was gone.

She crumpled up the paper bag her lunch had come in – a meatpie and an apple: Cartwright’s idea of a balanced meal. She was a tiny bit sleepy and beginning to feel mired in names. One of them –
Angela Wetherling
– had already come up three times. The twin Mr. Wetherling had called her Cousin Angie. Another Mr. Wetherling had called her Angela. And the family historian, Hadley Wetherling, had also mentioned an Angie. Hazel called Hadley again and asked if she had a number or an address. She did. Angie/Angela had been one of the Copetown Wetherlings, and she still lived there.