The Night Bell (30 page)

“These three lucky plungers are about to see – oh … yes?” Hazel barged into the shot. “Oh, excuse me!” She laughed. “I think I’m being arrested! Officer, are you going to arrest me live on air?”

“No,” Hazel said. “Can I have that microphone for just thirty seconds?”

“Of course! People, everyone, this is a policewoman! She wants to talk to you all for thirty seconds, OK? I think one of you left your lights on!”

Gales of laughter. Hazel took the mic. Instead of facing the crowd, she spoke into the camera. “For all you people out there watching a hill get blown up on the Internet, I want to ask if any of you even know what it’s called?” A few answers lifted out of the crowd, some of them correct. She turned to acknowledge them. “That’s right,” she said. “We still call it the Lion’s Paw. My mother, who grew up in this town, says her own mother called it that. People have been walking its bluffs since long before there were any towns or cities in this country.

“When I was a kid, you could see Highway 41 rolling away from the toe of the paw. And you could walk around, away from town, and look over the marshes, or you could come back where you started and look down into Port Dundas, founded 1841. And now someone’s going to blow it up. I hope you’re pleased with yourselves.”

The crowd roared with delight. Hazel passed the microphone back.

“Awesome!” Sally shouted. Gonzo Pete primed the dynamite plungers like a race official with a gun, and set the first contestant to her plunger. People put their fingers in their ears.

Hazel retreated to stand with Ray. “Do you know Gonzo Pete got his explosives licence
just
so he could prime those
plungers?” Ray said in her ear. “What do you think they’ll call it now?”

“The Lion’s Stump.”

Sally wished the contestant luck and counted her down from three. The girl plunged and there was an enormous, ear-splitting explosion.

Hazel gasped. A cloud of dust rose before the crowd and chunks of stone began to rain down.

It took a couple of moments before she heard the screaming, and then people started stampeding for the road. The debris smacked into the dirt and asphalt and some people fell to the ground. A rock the size of a dinner bun smashed down in front of them, and Ray grabbed Hazel’s elbow and pulled her back.

She tasted dirt and heard people shouting and calling out for each other. Ray’s weight pushed down on her. “Not so hard!”

“Geddown, geddown!” he said, out of breath. She allowed him to put her on the ground.

“How deep were those fucking charges?”

“I don’t …” he said. “I don’t.” He was becoming heavier.

“Ray?” She pushed him off and he fell onto his back. Blood trickled from his hairline. “Ray!
Oh my god!
” She scrambled to her feet. “I need help!” she shouted. “Somebody call an ambulance!”

People ran past her in both directions to escape or to help, and she saw bodies lying on the ground on the grassy
verge below the hill. Sally staggered up to standing from where she’d been blown flat, and shook off the dirt and pebbles that matted her blonde locks. She wanted to keep going. She rolled her index finger forward in the air and her cameraman mounted his camera to his shoulder. More people were running toward the blast site now than were running away. Hazel followed the eye of the crowd. At the base of the blasted paw, people scrambled over fallen rock and climbed upward. “You!” she called to a paramedic. “Come here!” Ray coughed and lurched halfway up. “Stay where you are!” she said. “Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” he croaked.

She left him and broke into a jog to get to the front of the gawkers. Above the scattered, broken rock, Hazel saw the cameraman balancing on a stone ledge, his lens flaring with sun. Above him, Sally had a serious look on her face as she talked into the mic, her other hand gesturing over and over to something Hazel still could not see.

She clambered up to where the girl stood.

“You again?”

Hazel paid her no attention. She stood with her back to the camera, her heart pounding in her throat, and gazed upon the upper half of a skeleton: an unmistakable ruffle of human ribs arrayed in gentle arcs with shabby tufts of cloth still clinging to bone. Through the ribs, she saw a shamble of vertebrae and she traced those up with her eyes until they fell on the empty, grimacing skull.

Hazel closed her front door on the world and stared down the empty hallway. She stripped to her blouse and underwear and left her dirt-covered clothing on the mat. She had already shaken her hair out in the driveway and she ran her fingers through the gritty strands.

She tiptoed down the hall to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror. Her eyes seemed bright, shining out of the grime. This must be what the survivors of Vesuvius looked like, she thought. She turned on the hot and began to wash her face. Black water rushed down the drain.

Ray was OK. He’d been struck by something large enough to produce a wobbly lump the size of a golf ball on his head. She’d last seen him in the back of an ambulance.
Others were hurt, too. Luckily, no one had been killed. The injured had lain scattered around, some of them badly banged up, the paramedics in their yellow jackets moving among them like bumblebees.

She opened the mirrored cabinet door and looked for some ibuprofen. She’d made a point of keeping any painkillers – OTC or not – upstairs. She’d been thorough; there was nothing there. When she closed the mirror, her mother was standing in it. “Oh! Jesus Christ.”

“You’re a sight,” Emily said. “Don’t you dare use one of those hand towels. Those are for guests. What on earth have you been doing?”

“I was at the groundbreaking. And then they had this … contest to see who would start the blasting.”

“What nonsense are you talking?”

Hazel smelled cigarette smoke. “Mom, are you smoking?”

“No. Paula Spencer is smoking.”

“Who?”

Emily shook her head like she was giving up. “You’ve met Paula a thousand times. I couldn’t find my cigs, so she came over.
She
still smokes.”

Paula Spencer had been one of her mother’s old friends. They’d played cards together until just a few years ago. But Paula Spencer was dead.

Emily said, “So where are they? My cigarettes?”

Hazel folded the hand towel over its rail. Without looking at her mother, she said, “I think I saw them in the kitchen.”
In the mirror, she saw her mother leave the bathroom. Hazel followed her, mind racing.

“I don’t see them in here,” Emily called from the kitchen.

“No? Oh, right! I think I saw them upstairs,” Hazel said. “Why don’t I go get them.”

“Don’t you go upstairs still covered in muck. I’ll find them. They must be with the ashtray.” Emily spoke in a clear voice, at odds with the way she walked, which was like an old woman full of pains.

Hazel waited at the bottom of the stairs, still in shock. They’d blasted clear to the base of the bluff, tearing away fifteen metres of broken crag and boulder that had obscured it for half a century. The SOCOs had gotten to the skeleton before she could examine it any closer.

But it had to be Carol Lim.

And she
was
smelling cigarette smoke. Had her mother walked all the way to the convenience store to buy herself a pack?

She checked her cell. Nothing. The remains would be arriving at Mayfair any time now.

Emily came back down the stairs, flustered. Hazel cut her off at the pass. “Mom? Look at me. Do I look like I’m fifteen years old?”

“No.”

“I’m not. And you’re not in your forties anymore. You don’t
smoke
anymore. You’re confused, Mom. Don’t you know that?”

“Ha!” she cawed. “Paula, do you hear that?”

Hazel took her mother’s arm and brought her into the living room to show her it was empty. Except it wasn’t. There was an elderly woman sitting on the couch smoking a thin white cigarette.

“Hazel,” the woman said, looking her up and down. Hazel realized she was standing there in her bra and underwear. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

“Mrs. Spencer!” She began to back out of the room, all the while making white-hot eye contact with her mother. “I really … I had no idea …”

“It’s a surprise to find some people are still alive. Henry Kissinger is still alive. So is Bob Hope.”

Hazel stood outside the room with her back to the wall. “Bob Hope died four years ago.”

“Oh shit, did he really?”

She went to the front hall and took a black raincoat out of the closet. She cinched it around her waist and went back into the living room. “You can’t smoke in the house, Paula.”

“I forgot,” she said, looking not in the least contrite. “The rules have changed.”

Her mother waggled the remote control at the television. “That thing is not worth the money your father paid for it,” she said. “Alan was right.”

“Was he, Mom?”

“He’s got a good head for
things
, your brother. But I worry about him.” She took Hazel’s hands in hers. “It’s up to you to look after him when we’re gone, dear.”

Tuesday was her normal day off, but she was just waiting for Deacon to call her so she could go down to the morgue. Her stomach had turned sour with worry: would the pendant be there? Would it have rusted away? Maybe it hadn’t been silver after all.

Wingate had texted her asking permission to go back to the archives. It was highly unlikely that Cutter would be there, and he knew he could talk his way past Putchkey. She gave her assent. He wanted to look deeper into Merchant’s relationship with Dublin Home.

Paula Spencer left.

“You thought she was dead.”

“It’s hard to keep track these days, Mom. Don’t you find?”

“A human life is like a bead of water on a hot griddle. I want to watch a movie.”

Hazel found an old Natalie Wood drama and her mother became engrossed. She joined her for a while, and then went to the kitchen to make them both toast and peanut butter. She cut thick slices of banana on top and drizzled a tiny bit of maple syrup on it. Her father had come home one day with a hankering for it and it had become a family favourite. Later, it was implicated in the revelation of her father’s affair with Delia Chandler. It had been her recipe. Everyone in that story was dead now except for her and Emily.

They sat together on the couch, eating toast. She left her mother asleep before the movie ended and crept away
to clean up. In the kitchen, the light from the television flickered, a silent party in another room.

At four o’clock, her phone buzzed. It was Deacon, inviting her down to the morgue. She drove to Mayfair with her lights going but no siren and made it there in less than an hour. Ray, his head wrapped in white gauze, had got there first.

Deacon repeated the cause of death, but Hazel was barely listening.

“It’s hard not to conclude it was a fall,” he said. “Lots of blunt-force trauma. But I don’t think that tells us much about what happened.”

“Where are the personal effects?”

He pointed her to a table near the morgue door. In a deep plastic bin, she found the remnants of clothing and shoes and a coat, panels of which were still intact. Hazel put on a pair of latex gloves and dug under the rotted fibres: a desiccated pink elastic band, a couple of rusted rings, a pocket Bible, a rusted belt buckle, a metal container, and two small stamped gilt earrings, each in the shape of a leaf and eaten away as if they were real leaves.

At the bottom, leaning vertically against the side of the bin, she found the graven heart. It was tarnished black and smoothed like a river stone by its fifty winters, but the rabbit was still in mid-stride, running for its life.

“It
is
her,” she said.

Ray lifted his head. “Who’s her?”

She came over to the steel table on which the bones lay in an approximate human shape. She imagined that skeleton inside Carol’s living body, and all the years it had lain undiscovered among the rocks in the ankle of the Lion’s Paw. “This is a girl who went missing almost fifty years ago. Her name was Carol Lim.”

“I remember her,” Ray said.

“I do as well,” echoed Jack Deacon. “How do you know?”

“She wore this around her neck.” She put the heart into Ray’s gloved hand. “I saw it on her the day she vanished.”

“Where?”

“It was by chance. In the fall of 1957, when I was fourteen. I was out for a walk with a friend.” She couldn’t help pausing, watching his eyes. “Gloria Whitman.”

“Really,”
said Ray in a tone of wonder.

“You remember her. They lived alone in the big stone house at the end of my street, overlooking the river. Just the two of them. Her mother died when she was a young girl.”

“How did her mother die?” Ray asked.

“I was told cancer.”

“What happened on your walk?”

“We’d gone to the Pit, so Gloria could smoke and drink some of her father’s brandy. Fifteen minutes earlier, she’d stolen the cigarettes she was smoking from guess who?”

“Herbert Lim.”

“And so, along comes Carol eventually. It wasn’t ever clear to me if she’d seen Gloria stealing from her father, or if she was just out for a walk like us. She was seventeen. Long hair, black as crow feathers. She must have heard us or smelled the smoke and she came down into the Pit. I remember her talking about sex. She was sort of provoking us. Carol took one of the smokes – I think she took the whole pack, actually – and she wanted a drink from Gloria’s flask. I remember what she said to us when she left us alone. She said, ‘See ya later, lovers.’ She walked away and as far as I know, we were the last people to see her alive.”

Deacon inspected the pendant. “Do they still own that corner store?”

“Until about ten years ago,” Hazel said. She suddenly felt dizzy, as if she were going to fall down. “Her father died. Her mother … her mother …”

Ray reached out and took her elbow. “Hazel?”

She returned to the box of Carol’s effects, her stomach churning, and ran her hands through them again until she came upon the metal container. “No,” she whispered.

“What’s going on?” Ray asked.