Authors: Inger Ash Wolfe
“What are you thinking?”
“Just covering the bases.”
The following morning, a bright autumn Wednesday under a cloudless sky, Hazel made two phone calls from the road. The first was to Clipper Falls, where, according to her last tax return, Gloria Whitman now lived.
“Betty French Hair Emporium, how may I help you?”
“Hi!” She put the call on speakerphone. “I want to make an appointment to get my highlights done. I hear Gloria is the best for that.”
“Gloria is booked solid through to the end of the week, ma’am. Our stylists are all fully –”
“Can she see me today?”
“She’s not even in today, ma’am.”
“Ah. OK then. I’ll call back.”
She dialled Wingate. He answered after one ring.
“Bingo,” she said.
“She works there?”
“Yes. But she’s not in today. I’m going to go to the house. How’s the data crunching going? How many more names of survivors do you have?”
“Over a hundred now.”
“Wow. Living?”
“More than half of them. A lot of these names we’ve come across before, but they weren’t dead ends, so we put them aside. There are a lot of men still living in Ontario who were boys at Dublin Home when Whitman was employed there. I’m only just realizing now how deep it goes. How many people are affected.”
“I think the government should cough up a lot of money to the men who lived through such terror. And people should know what happened. Any dead ends turn out to be name changes?”
“A couple. And then I caught a few more. I’ll keep going.”
“Thank you, James. This is my exit.”
“Be careful, Hazel.”
She hung up and drove along Concession Road 33 to Clipper Falls. Another half hour to the east.
“Was that her?” Michael asked his brother.
“It’s almost over,” James replied. “It’s going faster now.”
“If the union or the OPS learns what you’ve been doing and what they’ve been doing, they might shut the whole detachment down. And do you think they’ll be willing to keep you on payroll if this comes out?” He set down a mug of hot marijuana tea.
“I don’t want any more tea, Michael. It makes me drowsy.”
“It’s slightly sleepy or pain, you choose.”
“Pain.”
James had converted the kitchen table into a workspace. Both laptops were open on the table in front of him, and there were arcs of paper piles of varying heights on either side of him.
“Can you even focus anymore?”
“The pain focuses me. You see this?” He spread his arms and regally presented the investigating layout. “To my right, copies of personnel records from Dublin Home and Charterhouse, as well as copies of signed contracts for nurses, doctors, and staff. These over here are copies of some of the original intake and discharge records from
the homes; there are over a thousand names in those piles there. Both computers are logged onto the secure server at the station house, the one on the right is –”
“Why the fuck are you –”
“The one on the right is connected to an archive of public records in Ontario, the one on the left is connected to an archive database at Canada Revenue. So, you can see I’m pretty focussed. Hazel is watching my back. I don’t need you or want you to worry about me anymore.”
“Anymore.”
“Not like this, hovering over me! It’s been a year. I’ve officially survived.”
“You should sue them. It’s their fault you didn’t obey the restrictions of your leave. They let it happen. And as a result, you’re getting worse instead of better.”
“Look!” said Wingate, becoming angry. “You swan in and out of here with your narcotic teas and weird salads saying you’re here to
help
me, but I don’t need that kind of help! I can boil a goddamn kettle, Michael. What I can’t do right now is dot every
i
fast enough. Renald is still a captive and you’re on me for not –”
“Hey, calm d –”
“No,” said Wingate. “Why did you come here? To live somewhere for free? To make amends for being a shitty brother?”
“Jesus.” Michael Wingate snatched the tea off the desk. “I came to help because you needed help and there was no
one else. And if I’m a shitty brother, you’re a shitty patient. Look at you.”
“I have a job to do, OK? If you really want to help me, help me. Pull up a chair. Time is running out.”
Michael was silent for a moment, and he looked angry and chastised. Then he put the teacup down and joined his brother at the table.
“Do you remember I told you about Leon Cutter?” James said.
“Yes.”
“He had another name.”
Gloria Whitman’s home address in Clipper Falls was 11 Tennis Court. “Cute,” Hazel said, craning her neck to find the street signs.
On the highway up, she put her flashers on, but no siren, and pushed down on the accelerator. She never got tired of motorists’ reactions to the flashing lights: a brief panic followed by herky-jerky order. Tennis Court’s stem road led to a circular street. You could go either way. She turned right and parked. The numbers on that side were in the fifties. She crossed the road and started at one.
Six houses in, she came to number eleven. A new-looking Mazda 5 was in the driveway – she noted the licence plate bracket said
Alamo/National
. She crept up to the gap between numbers nine and eleven and walked down a path. A small
window midway along the side revealed flittings of shadow against a wall. There was movement in the back of the house.
A deck at the rear extended halfway into the backyard. Hazel pulled out her gun. Crouching down, she checked the yard. No dog. She went to the other side of the deck. From her vantage behind a wooden post, she could see the back door at ground level, and she could lift her head and see the sliding glass doors from the interior to the deck. In that room, a woman sat on a couch, bent forward over a coffee table and working on a laptop. Her mouth was busy: she held a cigarette in one corner of it while talking to one corner of her screen. Hazel watched her eyes scan up and then down and then up again. She crouched and leaned against the post. Was it Gloria? She hadn’t seen her childhood friend in at least forty years.
There was a sudden vibration in the post. She felt someone’s footsteps thudding in her shoulder.
When the thudding stopped, Hazel crab-walked to the back door and tried it: locked.
Her hands were shaking and sweating. A door shut inside the house and then nothing. She could either call for backup or kick in the door. She took two steps back and kicked in the door the way she’d been taught, with her foot sideways, right on the lock. “Coming in!” she shouted.
Silence.
She ducked her head to the right to look into the now-empty room and continued through the galley kitchen into
the front hallway. “Gloria? I saw you through the window,” she said. “It’s Hazel Micallef. Come out.”
She swept her Glock around to the stairs and then up at the second floor. She walked backward into the hall. “Who were you talking to, Gloria? She heard her voice echo upstairs. The first floor was clear. Through the dining room window, she confirmed the Mazda was still in the driveway. The house seemed empty now. A nice old house like this, you probably couldn’t fart without making something creak. There was a thumping noise below her. Very soft.
Hazel kept her gun at the ready and slid back toward the kitchen. She knew what that sound was. She listened for its counterparts: a click and a hollow bonk, another click. A pause, as someone loaded wet laundry into the dryer. Then two hollow thuds in quick succession.
She heard footsteps ascend to a door under the stairs. Hazel stood in the open kitchen doorway, her gun drawn on a head-level bead.
The woman was singing. A
la-la
song, not something with words. Too bad. Not much of a soundtrack to end your freedom on. The basement door swung open and she stood there holding a suitcase with a newly lit cigarette between her lips.
Now Hazel was sore.
She cocked the gun.
“Hello, Gloria.”
“Hello, Hazel.”
“Put the suitcase down and go into the kitchen.” She directed her with the end of the gun. “Take a seat.”
Hazel waited until she complied, and then she took the old pewter flask out of her pocket and placed it onto the kitchen table in front of her.
Gloria’s face drained of colour, making her features look cut in. She looked like an etching of herself. “I remember this,” she said under her breath. She picked the flask up. “Where did you –?”
“They found it with her bones.”
“Whose?”
“Don’t do that. You know whose bones.”
Gloria Whitman – barefoot in grey sweats and a black T-shirt – took a drag on the cigarette and considered the flask. She’d kept her blonde hair and her nice shape; Hazel imagined she had as many younger lovers as she could handle. “Yes,” she said. “I know.”
Hazel sat beside her at the table. “You went back. Why?”
“I wanted to make sure she didn’t tell my father. About stealing the cigarettes.”
“And?”
Gloria flashed a look at Hazel that she couldn’t interpret. Shame, or anger. “She’d gone back to the Pit. She was down there, smoking.”
“How did you know to look for her there?”
“I didn’t. I just retraced my steps and there she was.”
“Waiting for you?”
“Smoking. I told her I was sorry about stealing the Luckys and I asked her if she’d keep it between us. She said, ‘Why should I do that?’ She stood up and came toward me.”
“And? You defended yourself by – what? – hitting her on the head with a rock and shoving her over the edge?”
Tears began to run down Gloria’s cheek. “No … no. I didn’t mean to … I walked away from her! She followed me, calling me names, calling me ‘white ghost.’ You remember, she was a lot bigger than me. When you and me were up there together, it was two against one. You could’ve taken her on your own.” She searched Hazel’s eyes for understanding. “But I couldn’t. I tried to get away from her, but she caught up to me on the path and told me when my dad heard all the things I’d done, he’d probably disown me. I begged her. I offered her the flask, told her she could keep it. And then she … there was a …”
She couldn’t continue.
Hazel put a hand on her arm. “It’s OK … you’re doing good. What happened?”
“No
,” Gloria said in a choked voice. She got up from the chair and stumbled to the sink, gagging. Hazel listened to
her throw up. “I’ve lived with this for so long,” she said after a moment. “Sometimes it doesn’t feel real.”
“What happened, Gloria?”
She remained hunched over the sink, her shoulders shaking. There was an empty water glass on the counter and Hazel rose to get it and fill it for her. She stood beside Gloria and ran the tap. There was no vomit in the sink. Gloria Whitman was no longer crying. She felt a hand on her shoulder and she froze.
“What happened next?” Gloria said in a quiet, calm voice. “What happened next is that there was one less Chink slut on the planet.”
Hazel had no time to react. The blow drove her backwards into the kitchen table. She felt something hard explode against her forehead. The scent of iron filled her head.
“Nobody knows who Carol Lim was,” Gloria Whitman said. Hazel heard a high-pitched squeal in her head. Out of the corner of her right eye, she saw a shiny white arc, like a piece of gleaming bone, and she reached up and pulled it out of her cheek. It was the handle of a mug.
Everything was moving in slow motion: her mind struggled with the information that Gloria had struck her and that there was blood steadily flowing down the side of her face.
What do I have to do right now?
she asked herself, trying to cut through the interference of pain and fear, and she brought her attention back to the room in time to see a knife clenched in Gloria’s fist. She threw herself to the floor
and rolled under the table, and Gloria slammed into it. The knife chunked into the wood above Hazel’s head. She swung a leg out and hooked Gloria behind the knee and yanked. She heard the knee pop and Gloria flew backward like she’d slipped on a banana peel. Her head whacked the terra cotta floor. “God,” Hazel panted, sliding out from under the table. She hoped she wasn’t dead.
She wasn’t. Somehow she was already trying to get to her feet. She wasn’t too steady and by the time she was standing, Hazel was waiting for her with the Glock trained on a freckle between her eyes. “Give me one reason,” she said. Gloria straightened her body. She’d had an ounce of pride knocked out of her, nothing more. “The instant I stop seeing both of your hands, I’ll pull this trigger. Now go sit down in the living room. You can show me what you were doing on your computer.”
There was blood all over the kitchen floor, drops and smears, all from Hazel’s forehead and cheek. She didn’t know how to stop it but there were other priorities right now. She moved Gloria out of the kitchen at the end of her gun. They went into the living room, which was done up in pretty yellows and blues. The couch was upholstered in a bright daisy print. Hazel pushed Gloria onto it and dripped onto the cushions and the cream-coloured shag rug. Dark, red spots. “What did you do?” Hazel said. She was beginning to feel dizzy. “Why did you go back?”
“I told you. To make sure she kept her mouth shut.”
She stood up and kept the gun on Gloria. “Did you kill her?”
“I think the fall did.” In her mind’s eye, Hazel saw Gloria Whitman’s head exploding. “You’re a pretty sentimental person. You think people are all alike. They’re not and the ones who aren’t like us already know we’re not like them. They think about it all the time, and they’re doing something about it. Fucking themselves toward a majority. It’s all about the numbers, Hazel. My father could count. Could yours?”
“Your father worked at local foster homes and nursing homes. He had a little circuit in Westmuir County.”
“Daddy was busy. People loved him.”
Hazel reached behind herself for a chair and tried not to take her eyes off Gloria. She spun the chair around and sat in it. “You really loved your dad, didn’t you?”
“All girls love their daddies. And after Mama died, he was all I had. He threw himself into his work and forgot his suffering.”