The Night Bell (26 page)

The second time she rang, a tall, dark-skinned man answered the door. His eyes were blue and tired. “Help you?”

“We spoke by phone last week, Mr. Maracle. I’m Detective Inspector Hazel –”

“Yeah,” he said, and he stood aside. “They came and took hair
and
blood.”

She waved the folder with the report in it as if it could do the talking for her. “I’ve got the results from the lab.”

He led her into a room where a chair, upholstered in a worn beige fabric, faced the television. There was a couch and a coffee table to one side, but it was clear no one had sat on the couch for some time. He gestured to it, but she felt she couldn’t sit yet.

“I’m afraid I have bad news.”

“What other is there?”

“Some of the bones we found behind Dublin Home belong to your brother. It’s all in this report,” she said, leaning sideways to put the folder down on the coffee table.

“I believe you.” He was resigned in his manner. “I don’t need that. It doesn’t change anything. So now you think he was murdered. That’s what you’ve come to tell me?”

“It’s my duty to tell you.”

“Sit down now, would you? I’m not going to offer you anything because you’re not staying long.” She sat. “You know who killed him?”

“We’re not sure yet. We have some ideas, but most of our suspects are dead. This happened so long ago now. We’ve
found some men who were once in Dublin Home as boys, but you’re the only one who can put a name to a victim. Tell me, did you know a boy called Valentijn Deasún?”

“Valentijn. Yes, I knew him. He was Eloy’s friend.”

“He died in 1959. But how?”

“He fell to his death. From a window or a roof.”

“That’s what you heard?”

“It was a sunny morning on a winter’s day, then they drew all the curtains. That’s all I remember. After that, we had to spend the day in our dorms.”

“Did anyone see him fall?”

“I don’t think anyone saw him fall.”

“Do you think he killed himself?”

Maracle leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees. “Most of us were just trying to survive. I don’t know if he killed himself.”

“Eloy was his friend?”

“You wanted my brother on your side. Or he might do the opposite of protect you. He was good to the weaker kids and the young ones. Everyone was nice to the babies. So he kept an eye on Valentijn, because he was big and clumsy and feeble-minded. I never saw him do too much violence to his fellow inmates. He saved his worst rages for the staff.”

“Who did Eloy dislike in particular? Was there anyone he had a lot of run-ins with, or conflict?”

“He would get mad and do something about it. He broke the arm of an orderly fifty pounds heavier than himself.
But not taller. Eloy got tall genes. I got my grandfather’s blue eyes and my mother’s ability to suffer.”

Hazel wondered when the last time was that this man thought he still had a chance. Maybe his brother had been the lucky one, his life arrested before he learned where it was headed. If he could see his surviving brother’s fate, Eloy might think his own painless.

“What happened after he broke the orderly’s arm?”

“They transferred him out. Juvie, I don’t know. I didn’t hear from him and then I got a letter saying he’d died of influenza. I’d been with the Wetherlings for six months by then.”

“Tell me about the night bell. Or Old Father Crumb.”

He looked away quickly.

“Are they just stories?”

“Who told you?”

“A couple of people. One of them named Frances Kelly.”

“Nurse Kelly. She’s still alive, is she?”

“I spoke to her by phone. Obviously she’s much older now.”

“Nurse Kelly lives, but my brother is chopped to pieces and forgotten on the tenth green.”

“Along with others. Was there a night bell?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you ever hear something you weren’t expecting to hear in the night?”

“No.”

“But boys were found dead. Or they disappeared.”

“Boys came and went. It was not our place to ask why.” He rubbed the base of his throat with his hand. “How many boys?” he asked without looking up.

“We’re up to eighteen different DNA profiles. There may be more.”

“What a piece of work is a man.” He looked up. “What is going to happen to my brother’s bones?”

“When we close the case, we can give them to you for a proper burial.”

His eyes were far away. “I don’t want to be part of your case, Detective Inspector. I won’t testify, and I don’t want to make a statement or whatever it is you call it. If it’s possible for me to have Eloy’s remains, someone can communicate that to me, but otherwise, I don’t want to hear from you again and I don’t want you to use my name. Do I have your word on it?”

The Ladyman Café was packed as usual for lunch, and Monday lunches, in particular, were desperate affairs with people escaping their kitchens for the first time in two days. Hazel had made it back to Port Dundas in record time. She and Ray sat at the counter.

“So the idea was to get rid of anyone who shouldn’t be allowed to leave the home and enter society,” Hazel said.

“Three boys is not a strong foundation for a theory,” he replied.

“Valentijn Deasún – described as strong but simple by two people. Eloy Maracle – native, strong and out of control. Violent. Charles Shearing, a dark-skinned adolescent.” She swirled the ice in her glass and watched the light bounce around it. “You’d have to do it differently every time. Cover
it up differently. Valentijn’s record ends at Dublin Home. He’s shown as deceased in their records, but there’s no death certificate.”

“It’s lost, someone screwed up – there’re a hundred explanations.”

“Eloy’s record showed he was transferred to another institution. James checked every angle. The place he was sent to never registered him as a ward of the province. He never arrived. And we know he’s in that field.”

Ray turned his wedding ring on his finger, thinking. “Who could have gotten away with that?”

“Anyone, I suppose. But if you were efficiently killing and then getting rid of the bodies, nursing or medical training would be a good thing to have.”

He shook his head and then moved his arms off the counter to make room for the two plates that had just arrived.

“Toasted western with mayo, fries.”

“Me,” said Hazel.

“Toasted western, fries, mayo on the side.”

“You’ve been serving us the same lunch for twenty years,” Ray said to the man behind the counter.

“I like saying it. How come you never sit where your dads sat? You move all over – booth, table, counter – but never where they sat.”

“I don’t know.” Greene squinted at him in mock challenge. “I guess I want to establish my own legend.”

“You know why your father sat at the end of the bar, Ray? Because the second time he forgot to pay,
my
father told him he had to eat in the corner where he could keep an eye on him.” He patted the counter in front of them, laughing. “Eat up.”

Hazel looked at Ray’s plate. “Why do you ask for cold mayo on the side?”

“If they put the mayo on in the kitchen, it’s practically leaking out of the sandwich when he brings it.”

She took a bite and made a
yum
face at him. “We need a witness, Ray. Somebody who saw it with their own eyes. Maybe that person is Yoshida.”

“No answer still?”

“I’m going to go up there.”

“When?”

“If he doesn’t pick up this afternoon, I’ll go up and poke around. You ever been to Dunneview?”

“Sure. Half of the main drag’s been shuttered since I was a kid.”

“It’s almost all shuttered now. Last time I knew what its population was, it was under six hundred.”

“You better hope Mr. Yoshida is one of the people who stayed.”

“Well, that’s where his phone supposedly rings.”

Hazel got back to her desk and looked at the time: 2:20 p.m. She could get to Dunneview and back in five hours. But in five hours at the station, she could start planning for the last phase of the case: naming the victims. That was going to be a whole other database: finding kin, collecting blood, matching genetic signatures, entering it into a database. She imagined the dead rising from the fields for roll call.

She was proud of herself – and of James even more so – for summiting the mountains of data that had revealed the missing boys they’d found so far. For how many years had someone been permitted to carry out the scheme?

“Hazel.” Wingate was standing in her doorway. He was in jeans and a white T-shirt.

She laughed. “Finally.”

“What?”

“You look gay.” He laughed. She hadn’t seen a smile on his face in quite a while.

“Only you and Kraut are confident enough to joke with me.”

“Kraut jokes about it?”

“Oh yeah.”

“And you don’t mind.”

“In the coffee lounge Forbes was talking about finding a new apartment –”

“He and Olivia break up again?”

“Yeah. He’s poring over the rentals online and he says ‘How big is a bachelor?’ And Kraut says, ‘Ask Wingate.’ ”

“Oh my god,” she said, covering her mouth. “What did you say?”

“I said I counted on him to have my back.”

Hazel laughed into her palm. “Please tell me that’s what you really said.”

“I did.”

He was looking at her strangely, she thought. “Are you here to say goodbye?”

“Oh, yeah, I’m off. Any luck with Yoshida?”

“No answer. I was going to go today but I’ve got too much paper on my desk. I’ll go tomorrow. Get some rest.”

“I will.”

Wingate pulled out onto Main Street. He took the bridge over the Kilmartin River and drove along the 117 below the Lion’s Paw. When the town was behind him, he pulled off onto a patch of gravel, got out, and removed his uniform from the trunk. He got into the back seat of his cruiser to put it on. It was difficult enough to walk or sit down or stand up, but getting his long form twisted around in the seat to put on pants was black-belt stuff for his banged-up body. He hit his head on the roof when he shrugged his shirt over his shoulders. The motor and the lights were off, but someone would notice an empty police car. He struggled the jacket on and reached for his black shoes.

After a pause, he emerged dressed in uniform and got
back behind the wheel. He pulled onto the road and followed it away from town onto Highway 41. A few minutes later, a sign went by that gave the distance to Dunneview as 231 kilometres.

According to what he’d been able to find out on the weekend, Hibiki Yoshida was a Japanese boy found on a ship in 1950, a stowaway alone on a tanker that had last been in port in the Philippines. He’d found a story in the
Toronto Star’s
online archive. He was seven and he was sent to live at Dublin Home, and he wasn’t adopted for ten years. The adoptive family was a childless Jewish couple who took Hibiki back to Toronto. But when he retired, he returned to Westmuir County and settled in Dunneview. He hadn’t married, and he was on the tax rolls at a Dunneview address.

Wingate got to the town just after 5:00 p.m. All its main street was missing were the tumbleweeds. The side streets, however, reminded him of North Toronto, where he and Michael had grown up. Low-slung bungalows among old brick homes. For a moment he thought he could smell the particular combination of drying maple and willow leaves that had once been proof of autumn there.

He pulled up outside Yoshida’s house and parked. The blinds were drawn and the house appeared empty from the outside. It was one of the red brick houses, with yellow brick trim around its windows and doors. An old house. The driveway was wide enough for two cars, but nothing was parked there.

He unfolded his body from the cruiser and walked up to the door, aware that if anyone saw a policeman they would be concerned and perhaps the neighbours would come to see. It took the entire walk to Yoshida’s front door for him to straighten his body out. He rang the bell once. Hazel liked to knock, but he preferred a single musical tone to announce his presence. It suggested that something serious required the homeowner’s attention.

There was no sign that anyone was at home. He waited. His mind flickered one way and the other, between the 1980s in Willowdale and here, more than four hundred kilometres and two decades away. For a moment, the door he stood before had his family behind it: his brother, their parents.

A man opened the door. He was Japanese, with deep-set, intelligent eyes. He wore drawstring pants and a light-blue T-shirt that hung over his narrow frame. “Yes?”

“Hibiki Yoshida?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Sergeant Detective James Wingate, from the Port Dundas OPS. I’m wondering if I might talk to you.”

Yoshida looked to the street. “On all the shows, the police work in twos.”

“Budget cuts. And this isn’t a call. I mean, I’m not responding to a call. I just have a couple of questions concerning a case I’m working.”

“Come in.”

The house was small and very tidy, with blond-wood
floors and cabinetry. From floor to ceiling along one wall in the living room, built-in shelves of dark pine held books in a number of languages. There was a single potted ficus, and above a black fireplace one thing on the wall: a curved sword in its scabbard, mounted on wooden supports.