The Night Bell (6 page)

“If they need it, they will. But our police are very capable, Gloria.”

“I hope so. I’m scared now.”

Commander Gord Drury appeared at the wooden counter.
He’d been in the job for more than two years now, and although originally from Toronto, he’d made a point of getting to know as many people in the town as possible. His thick, black, walrus moustache made his face instantly likable. He and his wife had already been to dinner a number of times at Hazel’s house, and she had watched him dab his moustache meticulously after each course. Commander Drury smiled at the two frightened young women. “Come on then. We’ll start with you, Miss Micallef. Your mother can join us.”

“No, she’s going to do this alone,” said Emily, looking over at Gloria. No reason why the one should be punished over the other.

Passing through the pen, Drury introduced Hazel to the people at their desks: Constable Harry Bail, Detective Thorwald Mueller, and Miss Bollinger, the secretary. Hazel nodded to all of them. “The mayor’s daughter,” said Drury. “Swept up in a candy-theft ring.” They all laughed good-naturedly.

Drury’s desk was in a bright office at the back of the building. It had a wall-length window in it so he could see into the pen. Miss Bollinger sat on the other side of the window, and often communicated with him silently through the glass. He sent Hazel to sit behind his desk. “Like it?” he asked.

“The chair is nice.” She got up to let him sit, but he told her to stay, he could take a seat on the other side. She lowered herself back into the commander’s chair.

“So you and Gloria saw Carol Lim on Saturday afternoon.”

Hazel lowered her eyes. “We did.”

“Where did you see her?”

“We were on the trail up the bluff. We went down into the Pit –”

“Ah, the Passion Pit,” Drury said.

“We … um. Gloria had a pack of cigarettes …”

Drury opened a notebook on his desk and started writing. “What time?”

“About two in the afternoon. I was supposed to go home and get my brother, but I went for a bike ride first.”

“And what time did you see Carol?”

“I don’t know,” said Hazel. “Two-thirty?”

“And what did everyone talk about?”

“Boys.” She smiled, embarrassed.

“Ah. Did Carol seem upset?”

“No.”

“Was she in a hurry?”

“No.”

“Did she say anything that suggested, even subtly, where she might have been going?”

“I think she was just going for a walk. Like us. She wasn’t in a hurry. She wanted a smoke.”

“She stayed and talked with you girls for how long?”

“Five minutes. Less.”

“And what direction did she take when she left you?”

“She was walking around the Lion’s Paw. Away from town.”

“OK.” Drury closed his notebook and put an elastic band around it. “Did Gloria tell you anything she heard or saw afterward? After the two of you parted that afternoon?”

“No. She said she went down to Grant Avenue and walked home.”

He listened to her with total attention and then nodded to himself. “OK then, Hazel. If you think of anything else that might help us, you have your mother call me.”

“Maybe there’s one more thing,” she said. “Gloria told me Carol might have a boyfriend in Toronto named Tommy Landers.”

He wrote the name down and saw her out.

Miss Bollinger brought Hazel to the front again. Gloria stood up. “Your turn,” Miss Bollinger said, and Gloria went through to the commander’s office.

At least Detective Sergeant James Wingate was alive.

This was the mantra his colleagues at the station house had adopted when he’d been injured on a case a year ago. He was alive, but he was changed, and there would be no changing him back. He’d worked from home in May, and by July he was spending six hours a week in the station house broken up over three shifts. Now his hours had been increased to twelve a week – four hours on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays – but he was working his desk in civvies and had not been cleared for active duty. Part of his therapy was to come in to the detachment and be in the workplace.

Although he had no valid credentials and he did not wear his uniform, Hazel still conferred with him as a “civilian consultant.” She was used to his word slips now,
his occasional stutter, his strange new walk. He was still inside that body, and he remained himself in all the ways that mattered. He walked with effort but effectively, one leg pointing off true. On the other side his pelvis ticked down in counterbalance, rising and falling and giving him the stance of a cowboy. He held his arms an inch or two farther from his body than before.

They’d given him some glorified data entry – clearance rates for the years 1999 to 2004; follow-up calls – but Hazel wanted to keep him in the case loop, and sometimes he had ideas.

When she got back to the station house after lunch, it was shift change, and he was right on time. Hazel tapped him on the shoulder. “Your twin let you out of the house?”

“Michael knows I have important work to do: returning the phone calls of disgruntled local citizens. Dog poop complaints, parking annoyances, nois … ances,
noise
complaints.”

“Are they more gruntled after talking to you?”

“I don’t know. I check them off on this list and move on.”

Sean Macdonald hailed her from over a divider. “Husband and wife from Tournament Acres. They’re in Ray’s office.”

“You stay here,” she said to Wingate.

“This is Oscar and Sandy Fremont,” said Ray Greene.

“They live on Fuzzy … uh –”

“Zoeller Way,” said the wife, Sandy.

“One of the roads in Tournament Acres,” he finished, gesturing to his guests to seat themselves again. There was a couch along the wall inside his small office, and it was the only place left for Hazel and Macdonald to sit down. Everyone said nice to meet you. “Will you show DI Micallef what your dog was playing with?”

Sandy Fremont slipped her hand into her clutch and took out something wrapped in a paper napkin. She was a beautiful, slight woman of about forty. Her husband, fully grey at the temples, looked fifteen years her senior. “If you don’t mind just putting that on the desk,” suggested Hazel, and she did, handling the parcel like it contained a baby bird. Whatever was inside was bigger, though. It came down onto the desk with a clunk and the napkin opened like a white flower.

There was a piece of bone inside it. Hazel teased the napkin farther apart with a pencil. It was a portion of a short, curving bone, about four inches long and one inch wide. It was in the shape of a gentle scoop, white and grey, with marrow holes visible along one edge, tightly packed, like honeycomb. Part of a jaw bone? A rib? It was difficult to say. It was smooth, like a stone found on a riverbed, although there were faint indents stained black on its ridge. At one end it terminated in a clear, straight cut. “Is it human?”

Macdonald had joined her beside the desk. He ran his
finger along the length of the bone. “Maybe a cow or a pig bone? There’s been all kind of cattle- and pig-raising in those fields.”

“What part do you live on?” Hazel asked the Fremonts.

“Northwest part,” said the husband. “Where the invisible golf course is.”

“Is this the only thing your dog has brought back?”

“Sundancer brings all kinds of stuff back to the house,” said Mrs. Fremont.

“Sundancer …” Hazel deadpanned.

Mr. Fremont grimaced. “I got her a dog instead of a boat. That’s her revenge. I got you a bungalow, you know.”

“Where the restless souls of dead natives stir in their clay,” said Mrs. Fremont.

“It’s not an Indian bone, sweetheart.” He had a natural sneer.

“Could it be a burial ground?” Hazel looked around the room to shrugging. She wrapped the bone back up in the napkin. “We’ll get this analyzed, OK? Does Sundancer just run wild everywhere?”

“He can’t get into anyone’s yard because of all the fences,” said Mr. Fremont, “but the fence on our side ends before that old house.”

“The old house?” Ray asked.

“The old boys’ home,” Hazel said.

“Ew,” said Sandy Fremont, showing her white teeth. “Is that the bone of a person, you think?”

“People are going to want their money back over this kind of thing,” fumed her husband. “I mean, do you know what is going on down there?”

“Going on?” Hazel asked.

“This Ascot Group,” he said, lowering his voice, “it’s like a stack of Russian dolls, one corporation folded inside another. We’re on the board at the Acres. I see the financial statements. It’s like reading Klingon. And there hasn’t been
any
progress on construction, anywhere on the site, in three months.
Three months!
” he cried in a tragically hurt voice.

“I’m sorry for the trouble you’re having with your new home,” Hazel said, “but right now we need to focus on this.” She closed the napkin. “If you want to make an official complaint about the situation in Tournament Acres, you can always do that through the right channels, I’m sure.”

Mrs. Fremont arched an eyebrow at her husband. “See? That’s exactly what they said in Mayfair.”

“Mayfair?” inquired Macdonald.

“We’ve already tried to get the law involved,” she said. “But maybe you people don’t care if the folks getting ripped off are rich, huh?”

Oscar Fremont stood up. “Maybe we’re not rich
enough
! Let’s go.”

Hazel handed them each a card as they were leaving. “If … Sundancer finds anything else, please don’t hesitate to contact us.”

Oscar Fremont said, “Ha.”

Hazel brought cinnamon buns home for dinner. Her mother’s sweet tooth was still functioning, and if that’s what it took, then cinnamon buns it would be.

She bought three but asked for two bags. She hid one bag in the car and went in with the other two buns. She’d talk her mother into eating one to
save
Hazel from eating it herself. Some nights now, though, she was getting two and a half cinnamon buns.

The problem with painlessness is that it wakes your appetite, she thought. All kinds of appetites, even the ones you thought were in full abeyance. She’d gone a whole year now without so much as a twinge in her lower back. Her spinal surgery was well behind her, and the doctor had told her that with time the scarring would heal, the discs would continue to shrink – lessening the possibility of another rupture – and she’d find herself drug-free and fully operational.

There were days when she could almost touch her toes. If it weren’t for her gut.

“In two more years you’re going to look like a set of stacking rings,” her mother said. “You know, the kind they give to babies?”

Hazel laughed. “Eat your bun.”

“Stop buying two of them. I only want half, and you don’t need the half I can’t finish.” Emily liked to slice the bun in half horizontally and spread butter on each side.
Her appetite was better in the evening, right after the sun went down, and her energy improved as well. She’d fill with a colour much improved over cadaverous. There was something unnatural about the transformation, however welcome it was.

She slept so much now that it was only between the hours of seven and eleven that there’d be more than hints of her true self.

“There’s a new show I want to watch tonight,” she said, pushing her plate away with some finality.

“A cop show?”

“I like my cop shows.”

“My life is a cop show, Mother. For once I’d like to watch a comedy.” She was looking at the second cinnamon bun. “Well, we’re not going to waste all of this. I’ll put the whole one in the fridge and I’ll finish yours, since you seem so excited about it.”

Emily Micallef made her eyes into pin lights. She picked up the half
and
the whole second bun and threw them both into the garbage over Hazel’s protests. “I know you buy three of them, piggy. You don’t fool me for an instant.”

Hazel arrived at work at eight o’clock the next morning. Ray intercepted her at the back door.

“Jack’s coming in,” he said.

“A house call?”

“What do you say we get Fraser in the office with us?”

“Why?”

Ray looked around awkwardly for a moment. “Look, I appreciate that James is coming along and it’s really terrific to see him doing better, but I’m down a detec –”

“Dietrich Fraser’s not a detective.”

“He’s got SOCO training. And he’s been talking about taking the exam.”

“I didn’t realize we were doing co-op here.” He smiled tolerantly. “OK. But I’m still keeping James in the loop.”

“I never said you had to stop. But I need someone else on this. I need someone with some field experience, and Fraser has good eyes.”

“Where is he then?”

They went to the front to look for Fraser, but it turned out he had left the station house for ten minutes. She passed by Peter MacTier in dispatch. “You know where Kraut is?”

MacTier shook his head, but it wasn’t to say no.

“What?”

“He went to buy toilet paper.”

“For?”

“Here. He doesn’t like our toilet paper.”

“He has terrible piles,” Hazel said. “Go easy on him. Don’t tell anyone I told you about the piles, OK? Send him into 2 when he gets back.”