The Case Against Owen Williams (4 page)

“You gonna be able to find her?”

“I don't know,” Drost said. “I may not even try.”

Behind Coile beyond the screen door in the dim interior of the house, Drost made out the figure of a woman. Coile stood unmoving, watching him with his mean little eyes, and Drost considered getting back into the car and driving off. What held him back was the feeling that this may have been what Coile wanted.

“Why don't we go inside,” Drost said, “so that you and your wife can tell me what happened?”

Coile shrugged, grudgingly pushed open the screen door, and led Drost down a hallway towards the back of the house.

Matilda Coile was nervously waiting for them in the kitchen, a middle-aged, mid-sized woman bare-armed in a well-worn, sleeveless print dress. Drost noticed that on the left side of her mouth there was the suggestion of a harelip, but in spite of the lip, Drost could imagine that she might once have been quite pretty, and he wondered what had brought her to marry a pig like Coile.

Drost put his cap on the table and sat down. Mrs. Coile hesitated, then sat down across from him, smoothing her dress over her lap. Coile stood with his back to them by the window that looked out over the creek while Mrs. Coile told Drost again the story of Sarah's disappearance.

“When I talked to you on the phone,” Drost said, “I got the impression that there might have been some sort of argument before she went out.”

“I told her I didn't want her goin' to no dance hall,” Coile said. “And what did she say?”

“She lied,” Coile growled. “Like she always does. She said she was goin' to the movies. But she never went to no movies. I knew she wasn't.”

“Mrs. Coile,” Drost said, “I can understand your being worried, but it looks to me as if your daughter has simply run away.”

“But she ain't taken none of her things,” Mrs. Coile said. “I know she wouldn't leave without her things.”

“She could send for them. Or come back for them later.”

“But where could she go?”

“To some of the relatives you didn't check maybe. Or to some friend you don't know about.”

“One of them men she meets at that dance hall,” Coile said. “Brick Smith and his crowd. She thinks I don't smell liquor on her when she comes back. She thinks I'm a fool.”

“Okay,” Drost said, “I'll see what I can do, but I'm short-handed, and I can't spend a lot of time. And I have to tell you that I can't make your daughter come back here if she doesn't want to. It might help if you could give me a photograph.”

While Drost sat at the table and Coile stood looking out the window, Mrs. Coile went upstairs and came back with a snapshot. It showed two girls and a boy standing in front of a verandah.

“That's Sarah on the right,” Mrs. Coile said. “And her friend Vinny. I don't know who the boy is.”

Sarah looked a little like her mother but without the disfigured lip. She was also bigger than her mother, taller apparently, fuller, her heavy bosom accentuated by a blouse that was tucked tightly into her skirt.

“Okay,” Drost said, “I'll take this for a few days. Now describe her.”

Sweating inside his tunic in the heat of the kitchen, Drost got out his notebook and took down the details that the photograph wouldn't tell him. Five-foot-six, maybe. Brown hair. Brown eyes. No moles or scars. Left-handed. Dressed up for the dance in a white dress when she left.

He was weary of this, but dutifully he spent another half-hour getting the names and addresses of relatives and friends Sarah might have gone to.

“What do you think's happened?” Mrs. Coile asked.

“I think she's run away,” Drost said. “It happens all the time. She's legally of age. She can do whatever she wants.”

“She's a whore, that's what she is,” Coile said.

At five o'clock the sun was still high, the afternoon heat undiminished, and Drost felt sticky and irritable. Having stopped at the Pages' on the way back to town to find out what Vinny might tell him that she had not told Matilda Coile, Drost now sat facing Private Owen Williams across a folding trestle table in a small room at the armoury.

“I understand you know a girl named Sarah Coile,” he said.

“Yes,” Williams said, “I've met her.”

Drost studied him, waiting for more than that for an answer. Williams seemed nervous, but that, Drost knew well enough, meant nothing. He had come to the armoury with the idea that Williams might have set Sarah up somewhere as something more than a dancing partner, but he had needed only one look to make it clear to him that Williams would be incapable of anything so daring. Drost judged him to be nineteen or twenty, but with his bitten fingernails and his scared eyes, he seemed more like a grubby high school student than anything else.

“Where have you met her?” Drost asked.

“At dances.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

Williams hesitated, and Drost saw him calculating and wondered why.

“Last Saturday night,” Williams said. “At The Silver Dollar. What's the trouble? Has she done something?”

“No. We just want to locate her, that's all.”

“She works at the dairy in town,” Williams said.

“I know that, but she hasn't been there since last week. And she hasn't been home either. I thought you might have some idea where she might be.”

“No,” Williams said. “I haven't seen her since Saturday night.”

“When did you last see her there? What time?”

“I don't know,” Williams said. “I danced with her a couple of times, and when intermission started, she said she wasn't feeling good and asked me to walk with her a ways.”

“And?”

“We went outside. There's a shortcut she knew through the woods back of the dance hall, sort of a trail, and after a little ways that came out onto a road. She said she lived just a little ways up the road, and she would be all right now.”

“So she went on by herself?”

“Yes.”

“And you? Did you go back to the dance hall?”

“No, I went back to the armoury.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Her parents say that she didn't come home, and she hasn't been home since. What do you make of that?”

“I don't know,” Williams said.

“Do you think she might have been meeting someone else?”

“I don't know.”

“Maybe saying she wasn't feeling well was just a way of getting rid of you, so she could meet someone else,” Drost suggested.

“I don't know.”

“Did you watch her walk up the road?”

“No. I just went down the road the other way to the main road. I stopped at the canteen out there for a soft drink, and then I walked the rest of the way back here.”

“And you haven't seen her since? You haven't heard anything about her? No one around here has said anything?”

“No.”

“Did you see her dancing with anyone else?”

“Yes. Once with a young guy. I don't know his name. And once with a guy named Huddy. He was in a fight out there a couple of weeks ago. And once with a guy named Brick who was there with her friend.”

“You seem to have watched her pretty close,” Drost said.

Williams flushed and shifted in his chair.

“Do you think she might have been more interested in one of them than in you?”

“I don't know.”

“She didn't say anything about going somewhere else after the dance?”

“No.”

“Did she say anything about what things were like at home? She didn't say anything about wanting to run away or anything like that?”

“No.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Nothing much,” Williams said. “Just about the dance and the people there and stuff like that.”

Drost looked at his watch and then at Williams, wearily. This was a waste of time, he thought. The whole thing. He got up.

“Okay,” he said. “I guess that'll do, for now anyway. If you hear anything about her from anyone, I'd like you to let me know.”

He went down the hall and out onto the street past the guard, one of the rotation that stood out there uselessly twenty-four hours a day with an unloaded Lee-Enfield .303.

Tomorrow, he thought, he would give Hooper the list of names he had got from Matilda Coile, and since Hooper enjoyed driving around the country so much, he would send him off to see what he could find out.

Drost sat at his desk. Constable Hooper stood in the middle of the office, all regulation six feet of him, handsome, blond-haired, scrubbed, clipped, square-shouldered, the very image of everybody's image of the Mountie. Near the window that looked out at the jail, George Carvell, high sheriff of George County, slouched in an armchair tipped precariously against the wall, a tall, casual man in his late forties with a prominent scar across the left side of his forehead, the only outward damage that had been done to him in his year and a half in the trenches.

Drost had met him the first day he had taken over the Wakefield detachment the previous October. It had been Carvell's habit to drop in on Drost's predecessor, as the mood took him, for a talk and a coffee, and he had simply continued the habit with Drost. At first Drost had been polite but distant. He didn't want to antagonize the sheriff because he had learned as a good Mountie that you don't antagonize people if you can help it. But as a good Mountie, neither did he like the idea of a non-Mountie hanging around his office, listening to the traffic.

It had gradually dawned on Drost, as it must have dawned on his predecessor, that he needed Carvell more than Carvell needed him. There wasn't a person, a house, a farm, a road, a woods track in George County that Carvell didn't know about or couldn't find out about in an hour. Without him, Drost would still have been floundering helplessly, struggling to extract even the most innocent information from people whose minds became vacuums the minute he stepped out of the car in his uniform and addressed them in his Upper Canadian accent. Without Carvell, he would still have been blind and deaf.

So there Carvell sat that July afternoon with his legs stretched out as if he owned the place, and it never crossed Drost's mind or Hooper's not to say what they had to say in front of him.

“There's nothing,” Hooper said. “Not a thing. Nobody has seen her. No one knows anything about her. I went to every name on the list except one that I couldn't find, and I went to some other people that they said might know something about her. Nothing. I went to the railroad station and the bus stop. Nothing. Nobody had seen anyone like her.”

“Do you think that she might have got on a train or a bus without them noticing?” Drost asked.

“That's possible, I suppose,” Hooper said.

“But Matilda Coile said she didn't take any of her clothes,” Drost said.

“You said she had a fight with her old man,” Hooper said. “Maybe it was bad enough that she didn't dare go back for her clothes. Maybe he threw her out.”

“Maybe,” Drost said. “It still seems odd though.”

“Maybe she's set up with some guy and doesn't want to be found,” Carvell said.

“I wondered about that too,” Drost said. “I wondered if maybe she'd been set up somewhere by Williams. But he's not the type. He's a child.”

“He's the last person who saw her?” Carvell asked.

“The last person we know who saw her,” Drost said. “He said she told him that she wasn't feeling well, and he walked her to the Hannigan Road and left her there.”

“Maybe she did go home,” Hooper said.

“And then?”

“She had another fight with her father.”

“And then?”

“I don't know,” Hooper said. “I was just thinking.”

“What do you know about Daniel Coile?” Drost asked Carvell.

“Nothing that's new,” Carvell said. “That place he lives on is the family place. The old man died a long time ago. Dan had a lot of brothers and sisters. I don't know where the brothers went. Some of the sisters are married and live around here. Dan's wife came from out near the border, and the talk is that Dan married her because he had to. I guess they were a pretty rough crew out there for a while. They drank, and Dan used to knock his wife and the kids around. But he's slowed down, and a few years ago, the wife got religion, and I haven't heard much about either of them lately.”